"telecommunications reports." thanks for being with us. >> ahead on c-span2, representatives from the u.s. census bureau and national archives talk about the release of digital records of the 1940 census and their historical significance. after that we're live with the start of a daylong symposium examining the state of race relations and their impact on various segments of american society. >> this week we continue to feature some of booktv's weekend programs in prime time. we start this week with a look at pearl harbor and america's entry into world war ii. tonight after "the communicators" at 8:30 p.m. eastern, we'll hear from craig shirley on his book, "december 1941: 33 days that changed america and saved the world," in which he chronicles each day of that historic month. after that at 9:20 eastern,

we'll talk with historian stanley weintraub who gives a day by day account following the japanese attack on pearl harbor in "parallel -- pearl harbor christmas." and later, burt and anita smellsome -- fulsome in "fdr goes to war: how expanding executive power, spiraling national debt and restricting civil liberties shaped wartime america." booktv in prime time all this week here on c-span2. >> tonight on c-span pbs' tavis smiley leads a discussion on poverty in america and its effects on women and children. >> tavis, a number that, in the fact sheet i shared with folks. in 1990 the average member of congress had a net worth of $250,000 excluding their home. by 2010 the average member of congress had a net worth of $750,000, excluding their home.

so what happened to congress that they could triple their wealth in just a 20-year period? meanwhile, for the rest of us the average person has income excluding their home of about $20,000 both in 1990 and in 2010. so everybody else stayed level, but these members of congress found a way to enrich themselves. i'm not hating on members of congress. i'm not hating on wealth. but here's what i'm saying: people who have that kind of wealth don't understand somebody who needs an extra $40 in their biweekly check -- [applause] >> you can watch the whole event tonight starting at 8 p.m. eastern on c-span. >> the u.s. census bureau recently released its 1940 records on their web site. it's the single largest collection of digital information ever made available online by the national archives with statistics on the 132 million americans who filed a census form. the unveiling of the records was marked by a ceremony in washington with representatives

of the national archives and census bureau who talked about their historical significance. this is about half an hour. >> great job, connie. good morning. i'm david, the archivist of the united states, and this is a very special day for us. pleased to welcome you all to the national archives to officially launch the 1940 population census. for 72 years these pages have been sealed, and now we finally get to see what's inside. it's almost like christmas, the anticipation grows as the date approaches, and we wonder what we'll find. but unlike some christmas gifts, the census schedule's become more fascinating and valuable the longer we use them which is a good thing because we have to wait ten years between opening days. these days we follow research

room doors and throngs of researchers took their places at microfilm readers eager to get their first glimpse of the list of names. some of our regionallal archives even held midnight madness openings. we were ahead of harry potter. [laughter] this year, however, we're doing things a little bit differently as we fits a finish -- befits a 21st century debate. in just a few minutes, anyone -- no matter where they are in the world -- will be able to view the pages online. it's the largest single series of records that the national archiveses has released online, 3.9 million pages, and getting it ready for today was the responsibility of a dedicated staff at the national archives and the census bureau. more than 70 national archive staff members have worked to make the 1940 census available to the public, and i'd like to

express special thanks to rebecca warlow, jeff reed and the staff or our digitization services unit who created the 3.9 million digital images, it's actually 3.85. connie potter and diane peat row who have been preparing the public and our reference staff of the 1940s census with articles, lectures and blogs. staff and our open government division and in information services who have been overseeing the opening of the 1940 census and the building of the web site, especially our cio, mike wash, tom key, pam wright and lisa weber. hillary parkinson and our strategy and communications office who have been helping us spread the word about the 1940 census through social and traditional media, and our partner, archives.com, which has worked with us to build and host the 1940s census web site. when the digital files are finally opened, we'll have the

tools to form a more detailed picture of the united states during the great depression and the new deal era. several questions new to the 1940s census ask about migration, employment and education. on the individual scale, many of us will be discovering relatives and older family members that we didn't know we had, picking up on threats of information that we thought -- threads of information that we thought were lost and opening a window into the past that until now has been on secured. but -- obscured. we now have access to a street-level view of the country on the brink of global war. to find those family members, we'll need to do a little work at first scanning the pages on the screen until we light on familiar names. the 1940 census doesn't come with a name index, but the minute the forms are released, the work to create one begins. as many as 300,000 volunteers will take part in a crowd-sourcing project to create a searchable name index.

three leading genealogy organizations -- archives.com, family search international and find my past.com -- will coordinate these efforts, and we all look forward to using what will be an invaluable resource. i encourage you to join the effort so that we can have the index all that sooner. i also invite you to come back here for our annual genealogy fair on april 18th and 19th. there'll be sessions on the 1940 census as well as other topics of genealogical research. i said earlier that the national archives releases a set of census records every ten years, but we have those records only because the u.s. census bureau performs a herculean task every ten years to collect those millions of pages of data. we're honored to have the director of the census bureau, dr. robert gross, with us on this occasion. dr. gross has been census director since 2009. before that appointment he was director of the university of michigan's survey research center and research professor at the joint program and survey

methodology at the university of maryland. he's an author of seven books and scores of scientific articles concerning the improvement of surveys. he's a fellow of the american statistical association, an elected member of the international statistical institute, a national associate of the national academies, national research council, former president of the american association for public opinion research and former chair of the survey research method section of the american the statistical association. when did you have time to do any work, bob? please welcome the director of the census, robert gross. [applause] robert groves. >> i'm delighted to be here. this is a great day for all of us, actually, and we treasure this partnership with the national archives. you know, in a real way the every census gives a gift to the

country twice. the first gift occurs right after the census is done. it's part of the process envisioned by the founding fathers to have a lower house of the legislature that's proportional to the number of people in states, and we reapportion the house after each census. but then 72 years later another gift arrives, and this is the day of that gift. this is a very odd day, i must tell you, as a census bureau directer and as a member of the census bureau because we focus all of our attention on all other days of every year on keeping data confidential. that's our job. we take this as a sacred oath, and we have laws that protect the answers you give. and it's only this day, once every ten years, that we release micro records. the census is a reflection of

the time that was taken. so, too, of the 1940s census. the 1940 census had an unusually large -- given prior censuses or relative to prior censuses -- a number of questions on socioeconomic concerns. this was a great concern to the country at the time. the data on unemployment showed that 15% of the adult population was unemployed at the time of the census, and it showed that there were 8% of the population that had a bachelor's degree. this is now, by the way, 8%. so -- 28%. so times have changed, and the censuses reflect those changes. one key innovation and all of us are going to see whether this effects our relatives is that one in 20 persons got an extra set of questions. and so we're going to learn, you have a 1 in 20 chance of learning a whole lot about our relatives, and we'll see how that works out.

we estimate that about 21 million of us now living of the 312 million or so who are living right now will be able to find their own personal records in the census. this is a relatively new event as we all live longer given modern, modern society. most of us, however, will look for relatives. so i, i'm glad to see you here, i'm glad that you're part of this second gift of the 1940 census, and i wish you good hunting in these records. it's wonderful to be here. thank you. [applause] >> hello, my name is john spotiswood, i'm executive vice president of inflection, partner

with nara and the u.s. census bureau on this project. i'm really thrilled to be here today and thrilled we've had this opportunity to develop the 1940 census web site in conjunction with nara and with the u.s. census bureau n. this time of limited government resources, it's been exciting to see a silicon valley start-up be able to work hand in hand with a couple of forward-thinking government agencies to deliver what i think is a great user experience. the 1940 census web site is going to be enjoyed by literally millions of family historians and researchers around the world. we just hope not all in the next 0 minutes. [laughter] 30 minutes. [laughter] i'd like to really thank our nara partners, especially chief archivist ferriero and also re rebecca warlow, the project manager behind the project both for supporting us very well

throughout the project and also just for having the confidence in us to choose us as a partner for such an important project. it's unfortunate when commemorating a software release that the people who put in all the hard work can't be here. they're back in the bunkers making sure everything goes very smoothly for the release, but on that note, i'd really like to thank the chief tech novel from -- technologist from archives.com, eric jones, as well as julie hill who really helped the project come off smoothly. also a group of amazing and dedicated engineers including john drago, are tristan, rob, jeff among many others at archive. we believe they went above and beyond both our expectations and the specific requirements incorporating additional features and functionality like the one-step tools from steve morse as well as an integrated

930s -- 1930s search experience which we believe will make the overall experience fun and enjoyable for everybody. this team feels fortunate to have had the opportunity to work on such a historic project, and they do feel like they've contribute today a real national treasure here. we'd like to give quick thanks to the support team at amazon web services which is the technology cloud platform that we built the site on. they've been tremendously helpful and responsive through preparations for this launch. we're also proud as the chief archivist mentioned to be working at archives.com along with the national archives, with family search and with bright solid on a community indexing project of over 100,000 volunteers that will be creating an every name index for the 1940 census. it'll be coming out later this year, and it'll be available for free on all of our sites. so we're excited, and we encourage all of you to join us in that effort. finally, i sincerely hope that the 1940 census web site is the

first of many collaborative projects between archives.com and the national archives. our in addition at archives.com is to make researching your family history simple and accessible for everyone, and we can think of no better partner in that effort than the national archives. thank you. [applause] >> good morning. my name is david sicilis, i'm a professor of history at university the yoond, college park, and i'm going to say a few words about the monumental significance of the release of these records for historians. up until now we've had a kind of outline of the 132 or so million americans in 1940, but now we -- this allows us to really be able to look at all of those

individual tiles in the mosaic. there are and, you know, to explain why this matters so much for historical research, i need to say a few words about the titanic shift in historical methodology that occurred in the 1960s and '70s. prior to then u.s. history was by and large a grand narrative constructed by and about elites. the best educated, the wealthest, the politically powerful left papers and memoirs and inspired biographies, while the vast majority of americans left behind few traces in the historical record. but equipped with powerful new technology, the computer, and inspired by social movements such as the civil rights movement and the women's movement, thousands of historians in the '60s and '70s began to investigate seriously the lived experiences of so-called ordinary americans. although there was little ordinary about them.

whereas before it would have taken several lifetimes to compile and analyze, say, the micro population movements of every resident of a medium or large-sized u.s. city, now data about individuals could be keypunched into databases and queried. for the first time, the majority of the american mosaic began to come into sharp focus. and historians inventively turned to many kinds of sources about individuals such as probate records, but the richest of all were the manuscript records of the u.s. census. many of the findings of this kind of research were quite astounding. i'll just give you two examples about mobility. it turns out we would look, we used to be able to look with the aggregate data at, say, the population of a large city and compare the two points, you know, with a census of, say, 1910 and 1920, and the

population of that city perhaps increased 10%. however, when we're able to look at the disaggregated data and track the actual individuals, it turned out that the population of that city might have turned over by about 80% during that ten years as massive numbers of people moved out and hundreds of thousands or millions of other people moved in. so americans were on the move much more than anyone realized. similarly, we can look at occupational and economic data and trace patterns of upward mobility in american history. um, so the federal census holds riches for historians of many stripes in part because, as dr. groves mentioned, the census takers in 1940 asked a number of new kinds of questions. not surprisingly, federal officials were especially interested in employment and

housing in a nation battered by depression for most of the decade. the answers to many of the 81 questions asked in the 1940 u.s. census will help us understand as never before how the great depression affected work and residents as well as how the rollout of new deal programs affected the material lives of americans. in fact, nine of the questions are about social security. we can now see property values, the size and frequency of mortgage payments, and even what kind of lending institutions held those mortgages. historians of technology can now see what which homes had radios or flush toil lets and -- toilets and what kinds of fuel were used for heating and cooking. historians of material culture can analyze exterior construction materials and what kinds of americans rented furniture. historians of race and gender, of economics and business, of politics and policy who study

the inner war years also have been given kind of a set of new spectacles, and the list goes on. the real fun and some of the most inteeging insights come -- intriguing insights come from the cross-linking of data from these categories. so we can ask, for instance, what percentage of african-americans owned radios in 1940. where did they live? how old were they? what percentage of them were veterans? how many possible questions can we formulate out of the 81 types of data collected by the census takers? well, i thought of a chess board can which only has 64 squares and allows us the possibility of playing really billions of different kind of chess games. so i hope many of you will join me in plunging in. let's rediscover some of these lives that left behind fragments of information. let's explore some myths about

the 1930s. let's work with the facts, and let's respect and learn from our heritage. and, also, let's tip our hat not only to the army of census takers in the 1940s, but to those with the bureau today who worked hard toward this milestone. because in the current era of the so-called great recession, better understanding of our forebearers how they experienced the great depression can only make us a little wiser. thank you. [applause] >> and we'll invite connie potter who is an archivist here at the national archives and mike l snow -- michael snow to come on stage if you have any questions for them. >> why don't you take my seat over here. >> oh, do we do it to answer the

questions? [laughter] >> yeah. oh, not micked. [laughter] >> i've got a loud voice. >> okay, questions. >> if you have a question, we have mics in the aisle for you. >> am i going to act as the question? >> no. a question over here. can you yell? >> i'm trying to, and it just seems to be slow, what's the issue? >> so, probably, the way the cloud infrastructure scales up is we started with a certain amount of servers, and then as people hit if they need to, it opens up a new instant. so there's a little bit of a delay in open up enough instances to support the incoming traffic. so it should with fits and starts expand to cover, and you should see the speed increase over the course of the morning for sure. >> it's an indirect measure of how important this day is.

[laughter] >> [inaudible] technical questions. the census data, what format is it currently being stored on? i know health surveys used to be stored on public use data tapes. technology has progressed, certainly, from the punch cards that you used. how is the data presently stored, number one. number two, the data that we have now, has software been developed that will enable a researcher to extract aggregate day -- data and do analysis on the information? >> well, these are, these are images alone. >> right. >> as you just see, just saw, that is what you will see for some time. as the chief archivist noted, soon we'll all have indexes by

person, that'll be a great advance. and then richard rug les at the university of minnesota is producing for, really for researcher use a digital data set like those you've described, and that will follow. i'm not sure what the dates are. so soon researchers could do aggregate statistical analysis on this in a way that they can't now. >> thank you. >> it's projected to be ready in about six to nine months. >> pardon? >> it's projected to be ready in about six to nine months. >> hi, connie. i know i already grilled you over this -- [laughter] some time ago, but how do you think this is going to effect world war ii research? people are going to have a whole new way to research their ancestors that served in the second world war considering the lack of actual service records. how do you think people are going to start using the census now to back up their world war ii research? >> michael and i will both

address this. well, you'll find where they were living in 1940, but you will not get information about their service. you may be able to -- michael, i'm going to throw that to you. [laughter] the 1950 census is the one that's going to answer that better, and there are other additional records. >> and keep in mind that the draft was not instituted until september of 1940, so this is on the eve of that draft. >> yeah. >> there might be a way to -- [inaudible] get a lot more information than you could if -- [inaudible] >> see how the family was living before that person was inducted, yes. >> it's like the 1860 census on the civil war. >> [inaudible] >> yes. >> hi. >> could you use the mic, please? >> okay. i don't know where there's a mic.

my name is megan, and i'm with archives.com. i just wanted to mention, um, in terms of world war ii which is not a direct outcome, but i also work with the army, i track down families of soldiers who are still unaccounted for from past conflicts, and what this record -- the first thing i'm going to be looking for is to find the families of soldiers who are still unaccounted for. so in terms of world war ii what we'll help do is bring some soldiers home. >> thank you. [applause] >> i might just add that the world war ii years were a period of enormous population movement in the united states, westward movement, south to north movement. and so if we look beyond enlisted men, we'll see, you know, this even, you know, this was happening even as early as 1940. so we'll be able to see some

micro patterns of movement from the census. >> so i am a bit of a technologist here, but i'm not going to ask about the web site. what i am going to ask about, though, is the indexing project. and if you could perhaps for others who are less educated in this area, what aspects of this indexing project will be a manual process versus something that would be automated from static text, etc., etc. >> i guess i can, i can address that. so the 1940 collaborative community project is going to be, essentially, you know, computer-assisted in the sense that there's online indexing software that volunteers from around the country and even around the world will be able to access. to very easily index the images so the images are brought up in the indexing tool, and it's very easily laid out by line so that

you can tap through and very efficiently and quickly index. but it is a human being reviewing the process and indexing it. it's being done in an a-b test fashion, so there will be one person -- two people endecking every -- indexing every line, and then there will be a comparison. and if there's a conflict between the two, then there will be an adjudication. so it's a very effective and efficient and accurate way to index the record. that doesn't mean there will be no errors, but the error rate with this type of project is very, very low. but that also means we need a tremendous amount of volunteers because everything is going to be indexed at least twice and sometimes three times if it has to be adjudicated. so there are some potentially computer-assisted efforts that we're looking at to bring up some of these, to be able to index some of these fields that could be very interesting for research purposes but don't actually help you find your

relative. you know, extra information about them. and so we may be using some, you know, intelligent character recognition to get some of those fields which it's not worth having the volunteer's time dedicated toward because it doesn't help you find the record, and you'll be able to see it in the actual image when you get there. but for research purposes, it could be useful to have the index form. >> we had a question over here, i think. >> yes. um, my name is geri, i write a yearology blog -- genealogy blog s. and i'm hearing people from sweden, the nether or lands are accessing the site just fine, so the fact that it didn't work here -- [laughter] [applause] >> thank you very much. [laughter] >> so we've localized the problem. [laughter] >> rebecca?

i had a question for connie and michael. connie, now that you can talk about the census, now that it's out there, what was your most aha moment when you were looking at it? was there a moment when you looked at a record and you thought this is, like, really special? >> this is what happens when you really love census records. diane and i had been looking at farmers in -- [inaudible] >> we're live now for an all-day symposium hosted by the aspen institute on the state of race relations in america. a number of civic leaders, public officials and minority rights advocates are examining some of the institutional causes of racism. this is live coverage from the newseum here in washington, d.c., it's just getting started. ..

how these issues might influence elections, the general elections in november. so while we consider how the country has made progress on the racial front, we'll also try to examine why from a race related problems persist. and identify the newest generation of racial issues that emerge from the new multiracial reality. the premise of course is that the united states must deal effectively with these issues if we're going to be a strong democracy and leaders ahead. we will touch on and become a cultural institution and structural causes of racial problems looking towards new and viable solutions to these

problems and the context of elections, racial and ethnic identity, education and the media. we will be looking at what solutions we might have with these problems, what you can do, what the government can do, what institutions can do. in other words, this does what we think what aspirin does best which is provide a safe nonideological space to have an informed and educated discussion on the toughest issues of the day. we are delighted with the all-star lineup that we have for the coming day. five tremendous panels and a great presentation to start us off. first the inspiration instigation of this conference came from a juan williams who will be a moderator for part of the session. will introduce the moderators a little bit later. i want to acknowledge the work of my senior project manager, in

the front here, and also the work of our sister program, the roundtable and can be changed of the aspen institute. we also want to thank very important our partners in this venture, without whom it would not be at all possible, the wonderful folks at comcast corporation, who include brett perkins, johnny got it, child, charisse lily, karen buckles, one of chair, craig, and mike rhodes. thank you for your help. all these people work under the excellent direction and thoughtful direction of the executive vice president of comcast, david cohen, who i'd like to call to the podium. [applause] >> so, thanks very much,

charlie, and good morning, everyone. it's great to be here. and i know i speak for everyone at comcast and nbc universal, charlie, in saying how much we appreciate the partnership with the aspen institute to once again present this look at the state of race in america. and it's energizing to see the quality of the panelists in the scope of today's agenda. i think it's clear that we are going to have a day reach in ideas and opinions. maybe even more important than the ideas. i'm also personally delighted that this symposium appears to becoming an annual event, because this is a discussion that america needs to have more than once. and i think it's impossible for us to ask for better timing than right now. in the middle of what is already shaping up as a bruising presidential election campaign, even by the standards of american politics. and the political situation and some of the discussion on race

that we've heard in america over the last few weeks touches on one of the great paradoxes of race in america. the more progress we make toward being a truly inclusive society, the more we realize how far we still have to go. so today, we have our first african-american president doing up for reelection. how many people would've even thought that was possible 10 years ago, or even five years ago? regardless of individual politics, most americans recognize barack obama's election as an important social milestone for our country. harvard law school professor and author randall kennedy recently wrote that president obama's election has changed the perception of what's possible in america. professor kennedy also cautioned against what he calls an inflated sense of accomplishment when it comes to racial progress. i don't think anyone here would fall into that trap, or you

wouldn't likely be her, and i think that's a good thing. not with the latest census figures that show's stubborn of residential segregation that affect where we live and the kind of public school education our children can expect. minority populations grew at five times the rate of whites since 2000. apron and i census data analyzed by brookings shows that the average white resident lives in a census tract that is 79% white, 62% of all counties in the united states have a black populations of less than 5%. and economic segregation is still with us as well. with a median income of black and latino families still at less than two-thirds of the median income of white families. so clearly we still have many miles to travel down the road to full equality of opportunity. but many americans understand that, which is one of our

strengths. and through programs like today it's our goal that we can make more or help more americans understand that back. so america is making progress, and interestingly enough, corporate america is a hotbed of that progress. might have started with the affirmative action push in the '70s, but in the years since then, at least some businesses woke up and smelled the coffee. corporate america recognized the diversity of american society is a strength that needs to be reflected in our companies. speaking for comcast, we want our employee community and our bedroom community to reflect the growing diversity of our customer community, and we want programming that reflects the rich diversity of the thousands of communities in which our employees live and work. we are not there yet, but the trying makes us a stronger company every year. our acquisition of nbc universal broadens our media footprint and

reinforces our commitment to diversity. we want to encourage more participation by minority entrepreneurs in the media industry, and we were very excited in february to announce the selection of four new minority owned independent networks which we will distribute over comcast cable systems nationally. this was part of the commitment that we proposed as part of an nbc universal transaction. we have pledged to help launch a total of 10 do independent cable channels, eight of which will be minority owned and i know he controlled. so we look forward to watching those new networks grow and thrive in the years ahead. but right now i'm looking forward to what we can all of congress together here today. we have a lot of interesting people to hear from, and i want to thank everyone for joining us, being a part of today's program, a special thanks to our panelists and our moderators

come out like to bring charlie back appeared to get the program kicked off. charlie, thank you. [applause] >> thank you, david. let me mention that we are thankful to c-span for putting this on c-span2, and then it is moving over to c-span one a little bit are in the morning. it's also being streamed live at www.aspeninstitute.org/state of race. the twitter hash tag which we hope people will engage in dialogue over is hash tag state of race. so we are going to start off as we did last year with a presentation on the demographics of race. and we are delighted that our presenter for this opening presentation is dr. james jackson is the daniel katz distinguished university professor of psychology. i should say that we wanted someone with a multidisciplinary

background to do this, to look at the facts and trends, demographic facts and transportation of the university professor of psychology, professor of health behavior, professor of health education, and professor of afro-american and african studies at the university of michigan. please welcome dr. james jackson. [applause] >> thank you very much. i appreciate that. and my thanks to the aspen institute, both staff as well as mr. firestone and mr. cohen. united states, is this going to show? can everyone see that? all right. they asked me to take a few minutes, and i'm going to talk for about 10 or 15 minutes about issues that are related to race, particularly the kind of demographic trends.

the united states has always had a minority population there in fact both indians and blacks were mentioned in the constitution, but not necessary in a positive manner. blacks were to be counted at three-fifths white, white only indians were supposed between like the rest of the country to the measurement of race reapportionment, redistricting and so on continue to be very, very important issues. but what i want to cover today is the growth and the distribution of minority populations in the united states, with a particular focus on blacks and hispanics. blacks are currently about 13% of the population, if you count the single race non-hispanic black population. and 15.5% of the population if you've include blacks alone. or blacks with others, including blacks of hispanic origin. however, back in 1790, and i'm

not going to cover all of that time from 1790 forward, but back in 1790, the population was almost 20% black. the reason the percentage dropped is because of the influx of immigrants to the united states over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. the major influx of blacks to the united states occurred via way of the slave trade, and this ended around 1830. this also, by the way, foreshadows the future growth of the population in the united states. 12.9% of the population in the u.s. is foreign-born. race, ethnic groups that draw from the foreign-born populations will continue to grow. primarily asians and hispanics. with those that are not native americans, can only grow through higher than average fertility. blacks will have some contribution from the caribbean

and african populations, but those numbers actually are small in comparison to the asian anti-hispanic populations. -- and the hispanic populations. the two major streams are from south of the border of the central and south america, and to the east, asia. both of these are contributing to the future of a majority, minority united states. this influx of asians and hispanics occurred after the 1965 immigration reform. hispanics surpassed blacks as the largest minority group last decade, around 2002. percentagewise, asians are were hispanics were around 1980. but they are unlikely to grow as rapidly as latinos did. they are also a group that diverges from other minority populations in terms of

self-education, income and residential location. i should also note that asians are a very complicated population group and there are some populations, all of the asian group, that are much worse off than others. along with the older, older average age in the economy, some asians track closer to non-hispanic white van to blacks into latinos. returning to the growth and distribution of the black population for a moment, this population has been a small fraction of the total population for most of the history of the united states. however, the distribution has not been even. the south has always been the dominant region. but starting in the 1920s blacks have shifted to other regions, and, of course, in the 1930s and so on with the great info migration of blacks, went to the northward jobs and for

other reasons. and within the south, the top black states percentagewise are mississippi, louisiana, georgia, maryland, south carolina and alabama, all with one quarter or more of the states population. in all of the states, except for louisiana, the growth rate of the black population was positive. some people have offered the explanation for louisiana is of course hurricane katrina. but only a few of these states had growth rates above the national black growth rate of 11% shown at the bottom. these states were delaware, georgia, north carolina and maryland. here's a quick snapshot -- want to make sure -- more important,

realize how much the latino and asian populations grew in these states. for example, georgia added 579,000 blacks in the decade, and 418,000 hispanics. more hispanics were added to north carolina's population than blacks. but that is also true for louisiana and south carolina. this is even more dramatic for texas and nevada. california is an example of a state with a black population actually declined. one of the hispanic population continued to grow at a healthy clip. several russ state belts, rust belt states followed this pattern with a declining black population and the growing hispanic population. illinois, michigan, pennsylvania, new jersey and new york. here's a quick snapshot of the changing dynamic of the latino population in the united states. the top two panels show this

population in 1980, in 1990. the bottom to show the years 2000, and 2010. notice the dramatic increase in the distribution of latinos to the southeast population in the last decade. latinos are still concentrated in the southwest, but they have moved -- i show -- we look at the distribution of the undocumented population. many of them have moved to the top five states of california, texas, new york, florida and illinois, and many other states, including the southeast. in 2000, these five states accounted for 62% of the undocumented population. by 2007, it dropped to 53%, with

relatively stagnant growth of this population some of the old patterns, that is, movements back to the southwest, have returned. this is a slider just to remind you of what we noted earlier. in terms of how well families are off, both latinos and blacks as well as native americans in comparison to non-hispanic white populations are much more likely to be impoverished or in near impoverished status. similarly if we look at education, this slide shows exactly the same phenomenon. in comparison to non-hispanic whites, hispanics are delayed and an african-american populations are much worse off in terms of educational attainment than our non-hispanic whites. if we look at the issue of

bringing other minority groups into this equation, as of the 2010 census, more states are majority-minority. that is, it means that the minority populations are larger than non-hispanic white populations. these states are not a surprise. i think most people. but what may surprise everyone but school teachers and pediatricians, is that the majority-minority distribution and what it looks like from the child population, that is less than 18, and for the less than five year old population, and you can see that the numbers grow larger for majority-minority populations, the younger we look at them. in fact, in 2009, only 54% of the births in the u.s. were non-hispanic white. 15% were black, and 24% were hispanics. back in 1990, 64% of the births

were to non-hispanic whites. the share of majority-minority increases dramatically if one goes down the smaller geographies. 340 of 3142 counties are majority-minority. 593 are majority-minority with populations less than 18, and 612 are majority-minority with a population less than five. now, counties are fairly arbitrary geographical units. so metro areas are perhaps more informative comment and also recognizable to us. of the 54 metro areas of over 1 million in population, 15 are majority-minority, of almost 30%. and of the nine listed, notice how the percentage increases among the young population.

united states, and this is not in the slide but an important part of the story, is fast becoming an aging, and will do so between 2030 and 2050. an aging society is defined as more people in the population who are over 60 banner under 15. the united states is just on the cusp of becoming such an aging society, as a large earthcorps, that is 76 million baby boomers born between 1946-1964, now begin to reach old age and the u.s. begins to see longevity gains. that is, people are living longer and reduced fertility in the population. and i might add, this change in the population, age distribution, is permanent. this is not an aberration of the baby boom's moving through, but the united states population is

going to permit move to this particular age between 2030 and 2050. it just means that indeed we are squaring off this particular pyramid. so the pyramid with a large base of younger people and that a very, very small top with older people is going to change. both people are living longer and because of lower fertility. we will not return to the pyramid shape of the united states population of the 1950s and the 1960s. something that i think is really more important, and the reason why i bring age to this equation is this particular slide. and this shows you that not only thinking about the majority-minority geography, but also thinking about the issues of the aging of the population, or to think about what the implications are for the united

states over the next 10 to 20 years as we move towards this aging society. demographers predict that the united states will be a majority-minority nation around 2040. but this is very much tied to the age structure of the united states. currently, 20% of the 65 plus population is white non-hispanic. this population will be 42% minority in 2050. on the other hand, the under 18 population is already 45% minority, and will be 62% minority by approximately 2050. we can make a potential cultural gap measure to find as the difference in the setback of non-hispanic whites among the old and the young. this cultural gap is defined as a percent of nonwhite hispanics

among the population 65 plus, minus the percent non-hispanic white population among population less than 18 years of age. and by culture, i mean issues with regard to food preferences, language, leisure pursuits, and so. they are, indeed, differences among various different cultural groups in the united states. if we take a look at states, we see that several southwestern states score pretty high on this particular index. compare it to the national average, which is at the bottom, which is about 15. but some parts of the country have older populations that are markedly different than the child population. for example, retirement destinations like arizona and florida or community's with relatively fast-growing minority populations. as an example, it's difficult to have healthy school financing when the elderly don't identify

with the school-age population. or the young go support initiatives for the elderly when they are perceived as being from different cultural groups. it makes decisions as to whether a city, for example, should set up a senior right service or an afterschool program and whether this becomes a very contentious issue. if we look at the high cultural gap in metros among the 100 top metro areas, you can see that some of the high potential cultural gap mentors have a very wide elderly population, like phoenix, for example. but a metro area can also have a high score, even if the elderly population isn't so predominately white. non-hispanic. for instance, stockton, california, is only 6% non-hispanic white among the elderly, but the school-age population is predominantly minority.

in fact, it is only 23% non-hispanic whites. we also can look at metro areas with a low potential cultural gap. both of these are predominately non-hispanic white commuters, like portland, provo, pittsburgh, knoxville and so on. but the opposite can happen as well. honolulu, washington, d.c., and el paso are all majority-minority areas with the elderly, and child population with a reasonable ethnic balance. and there's a history in truth. the school-age population is pretty similar to the elderly population in terms of race. this last slide shows the potential of the race, ethnic, age potential cultural gap for the continental united states as a whole. and you'll get a sense with regard to the size of it is. it's also important to remember that there is tremendous

heterogeneity among the race ethnic groups in different parts of the country. that is, when we talk about race and ethnicity, sometimes we treat that as sort of a homogeneous thing, but it's not. what we mean by race and ethnic groups in the southeast part of the united states, is very different than what we might mean regard to race and ethnic groups in the south west part of the united states. that's an important issue. also, i think it's important to note that the non-hispanic white population is not all that necessarily uniform either. that is, the non-hispanic population in new york state is probably a very different non-hispanic population than it is in the southern states. so that as we think about these potential cultural gaps that might exist because of the change in age distribution and the growth of these race and

ethnic minority populations, we have to think about this in a very nuanced way, and think about more areas of geography that might be important. now, if we combine this potential for these cultural gaps with other issues which are important, such as the definition of race, particularly changing nature of self definition, the continued growth with regard to particular populations that come up, it does indeed present a challenge and conundrum with how we face is in the. thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you, dr. jackson. that was very enlightening, and created a new lexicon for me, cultural gap that will be very

significant over the coming day. we are now ready for the count them and i would like to call our panelists for the first panel to the stage while the introduce our moderator. he is the political analyst for fox news, former columnist for the "washington post" and senior correspondent for npr. is the author of six books, three of which were bestsellers, including eyes on the prize, he's interviewed last five presidents and many supreme court justices, leading business and political figures. as i said earlier he was the catalyst for the sole shoes. please welcome juan williams. [applause] >> good morning. i hope my microphone is working. giving him a? charlie, thank you for that kind introduction. i was thinking all those kind thoughts about myself as you were speaking. [laughter] it's a pleasure to be here this morning with all of you. for this very important discussion, and professor, thank

you for that introduction to this difficult topic because i think age and generational divide as the professor was explaining are absolutely critical for our understanding of race here early in the 21st century. but as david cohen noted, the context of our discussion this morning is really set by the bruising political race that is about to begin, a race that features the nation's first african-american president seeking reelection, a race that also comes at a time of tremendous racial shift in terms of attitude and ideas in our country. and to help us go through this scenario, this landscape, we have some expert guidance is going to let me introduce our panelists. on my left, you're right, charles blow, editorial columnist for "the new york

times" whose title is op-ed columnist. is also the author of the blog item numbers. mr. blow join the new york times in 1994 as the graphics editor and became the papers graphics director. he then became the papers design director for news before going on to national geographic magazine. he then returned to "the new york times" to do his column. and, of course, his appeared on many tv shows. i would highlight fox news and fox and friends. he is a graduate of grandly state university magna cum laude. please help welcome charles blow. [applause] to my immediate left is karen narasaki. she is the immediate past president and executive director of the asian american justice center, a member of the asian american center for advancing justice. she was also vice chairwoman of the leadership conference on civil rights the nation's oldest and broadest civil rights

coalition, and chair of the rights working group, a coalition of human civil and immigrant rights groups who are looking at the erosion of civil liberties and basic immigration rights after 9/11. she served on the board of common cause, independent sector, voters committee on civil rights, and she currently serves on the advisory council of wal-mart, nielsen media research and contest. please help me welcome karen narasaki. [applause] and to my right, norman ornstein, resident scholar at the american enterprise institute. mr. ornstein is resident scholar at aei, and a longtime observer of congress and politics, and i think the best but he writes a word -- a weekly column for roll call. he also serves as an election analyst for cbs news. he was the codirector of aei's brookings election reform project, and participates in aei's election watch series.

i think it's pertinent again in a season which we have so much money in the political system that you should know that mr. ornstein helped to shape the mccain-feingold campaign finance law that was result overturned and the courts citizen unite decision but he's also the author of several books include the forthcoming, and i think the title says it all, it's even worse than it looks. how american constitutional system collided with the new politics of extremism. please help me welcome norm ornstein. [applause] norm, let me begin with you. in talking in general about race and politics in american society, i just want to throw out two quick names, and get your response, norm. the two names i would throw out to you are mitt romney and sheriff joe arpaio. >> well, of course, if you recall in the past it was a debate in arizona before the

primary in which joe arpaio sat in the audience smiling and nodding vigorously, pritchett of late as mitt romney extolled the arizona immigration act, as it actually he would probably take even a little bit further. i could punctuate that now with a third man, which is russell pearce, who is the author of the bill who was recalled and bounced from office because of his extreme views who said just a few days ago that mitt romney's position on immigration is the same as his own. now we see mitt romney pushing the reset button a little bit on this issue, and he has changed the focus by excoriating barack obama for not pushing hard for a comprehensive immigration bill. but as we see surveys that show that romney's support among hispanics has been hovering around 14%, about a third of

what george w. bush got, and barely more than half, i should say also that less than half of what john mccain got. and if you look at the presentation we had on the distribution of votes, this is a huge problem and a huge burden. what it tells us i think more generally, juan, is that you've got a set of forces in the country now, which is primarily -- primary voters and the base of the party, and it's particularly two of the republican party, that poll the candidates in a direction which is in the direction you have to go if you're going to appeal to both the center and to a group of voters who are critical in a whole series of swing states. and it's going to raise the issue of race with hispanic voters i think to a different level, and it's going to require a different kind of dialogue. because i think whatever one

feels about the specifics of that immigration law, or other immigration bills, a message out there which is in effect we don't want your content, moves to a different level. and it's not clear to me that if you pick, say, a cuban-american to put on the ticket, that that will necessarily mitigate against those views for the mexican-americans or puerto ricans, or salvadoran americans, or others who are going to be critical voters in a lot of places. >> there you are referring to florida senator marco rubio i suspect, am i right? >> exactly. there are other chases -- choices that mitt romney will look at. governor of nevada, brian sandoval, and then the governor of new mexico, martinez. when a republican campaign figured raise that name to me a week ago, i said that's a great template, take a woman governor from a small state.

that works well, doesn't it? [laughter] >> let me ask you, when you were speaking a moment ago about the potential for the hispanic population to change the racial conversation in the 2012 election, i was struck by the idea that the assumption is the black vote goes totally to president obama. >> and i think the black vote is going to go, the same percentages or numbers the last time which is something like 96-three night. the question there is turnout, and that's where the name trayvon martin i visit comes up. there's been certain a lot of talking sure we'll have discussion of what the enthusiasm level is of voters, and we saw first in 2010 the democrats had a disaster on the hands all across the country, because the voters are turned up in such dramatic numbers in the presidential year of 2008 dropped off. what happens to those voters, and that means young voters,

african-americans, hispanics and asians who went with the african-american population, 96-3, it was two to one those other groups, who will turn out. my guess is that neither we see a sharper focus on some of those racial issues, today the "washington post" had a front-page piece that moves beyond trayvon martin to look at other communities where we've seen some of these sharp divisions on racial questions. that it's going to raise a profile here, now with those issues, and may have an impact on turnout, and may change to some degree the dialogue that we have in this campaign. >> karen, i wanted to ask you a question, much as i asked norm, to kind of get your position as you look at areas of expertise, areas where you are working. and the question is this, all of us noticed a tremendous growth in the latino community, we have heard about from the professor, now from norm. but also in the asian population

there's been tremendous growth. so the question is, where do you see these populations, kind of obvious given what we've just heard from norm, that everyone is battling over the hispanic population, but what's going on with the asian population? >> i do think it is the sleeping giant that the latino vote was talked about 20 years ago, because the asian vote not only has grown exponentially, it's actually grown faster than the latino population. but it is spreading out. so we are no longer just indicate ways of california, new york, illinois. we are actually some of the fastest growing population in nevada which is a battleground state. we are now 9% of the population. we clearly contributed to senator reid's reelection, and he knows that. and he leaned into that vote very heavily. but he's been one of the few of the mainstream elected politicians, clearly he is looking at the demographics and understanding that in close elections this community really

matter does not have them and asians in virginia. virginia went for obama last time largely because northern virginia as were asians are stronghold, together with latinos and african-americans. and they again can make a difference. they only won by a couple hundred thousand votes. so in a lot of places like florida, pennsylvania, ohio, it's no longer smoke and mirrors. we are no longer pretending that asians can actually be a different, they actually are a difference. in california, not much was made of the fact that in the last election in 2010, the governor's election and the senator's election went democratic, even though the white vote went republican. it was latinos, asians and african-americans who actually elected the sender and the governor of the state. i think that the republicans are making a big mistake. the latino and asian communities

still are groups very much up for grabs. in the "l.a. times" poll, for example, in the 201 2010 thoughu saw asians and latinos, they are soft democrats. they are leading democrats to a lot of the asian vote is to independent. they are being pushed there and they're being pushed there by many of the forces that norm talked about. you know, the very anti-immigrant vote. and is becoming so harsh that even african-americans who i think that the immigrants were hoping they would be able to get african-americans into their column, particularly in the south, are so struck by how extreme the party has gone in places like alabama that they have actually joined forces and they are forging a new alliance picks would be very interesting to see not just what each ethnic group and racial group goes, but now the coalition's that are being formed. in this new election. >> i was listening to you and i was struck -- excuse me -- able

to focus on heavily on the hispanic vote. you said the smoke and mirrors is gone with regard to the asian committee. that it is a substantial vote. you mention nevada as a swing state with a substantial asian population. are there others that you would pick out force this month? >> definitely. we're very much looking at virginia, which the democrats are hoping to hold but it is unclear given how the 2010th election win. they lost three of the democratic congressional seats but we're looking at florida, pennsylvania, ohio. i think the other thing that is important is obama does not, and the democrats, don't have a lock on the immigrant vote. they are hoping that the republicans continue to be so anti-immigrant that immigrants have no place to go but the democratic party. so latinos are not that happy with president obama either. he has deported record numbers of immigrants, and has enforced much more effectively than bush

did all of the immigration laws. and there's much concern about the racial profiling that is happening and all of these communities, which is actually begin forging alliances with the african-american community because latinos and asians are beginning to feel the impact of racial profiling as well. the question is, is either party really going to invest in a real way in getting out? because these are voters who vote on the issue. they are not partisan yet. many latinos are looking at the african-american community saying, we don't want to be taken for granted like the democrats have taken for granted the african-american vote. maybe we need to send a message. may be in the short run need to send a message to the democrats, you can't take us for granted either. >> what you're saying though i thought was, that given the media political climate is quite a that the asian vote is leaning or been forced toward the democratic column. >> that's what norm said. what's the turnout going to be, right? is there going to be the

excitement? yes, i think a majority of the asian vote is going to continue to turn democrat just because that's where republicans are pushing them, but how many of them will actually turn out to vote, and in these immigrant communities the challenge has been to get the registration numbers up and get them actually out the door to vote. >> charles blow, let me come to you. you have been recently been doing some groundbreaking -- groundbreaking reporting in terms of the trayvon martin case as a trigger, a potential trigger in terms of black turnout. many could excite critical praise for the obama campaign that otherwise might become and this is picking up a something kerry was sent, might be somewhat non-plus like his performance in office. >> let's set the stage first. last time around you had record after an american turnout. however, if you look at, you know, we elected to present to

the electoral college. you look at electoral college and look at how the states add it up to it every african-american voter in america had stayed home in 2008, barack obama would still be president of the united states. so barack obama did not need the record turnout that he got. this time around, he will need those voters. because his support among the white population has gotten so soft, and there is a portion of the group that is so hostile to him that, to make the numbers add up, there are few states where it becomes really critical. you know, it is the virginia's, it is the florida is where you only win by three percentage points, and you have new voter -- i don't call them, voter disenfranchisement laws that basically you can shave off one,

two, three, 5% of the vote in a state where you already have a softening white vote. that means that you actually need heavy turnout from the african-american population. that said, i believe that you were going to have a high african-american turnout regardless. what you see, you know, when the obama machine, which is an enormously efficient and enthusiasm, enthusiastic machine, when it kicks into gear and they paint the portrait of a president under siege, you will have a circling of the wagons among the african-americans. it's true. now, people say that's just because he is a black guy. not necessarily.

unit, kerry won i think 80% of black folk, and democrats -- it is just a problem, you know, even though on virtually every social issue they are pretty much in line with republicans. very conservatives. but because of what they see as a racially changed kind of campaign pushback against them since reagan, reagan was the last one who wanted decent percent of the african-american votes to i think he won 80% of the african-americans. no one has come close. ever since then, and that was a big, that was the last time i can recall a push to include african-americans in the dialogue, included in the republican platform. that has not shown up again and

the national platform that goes to the floor of the convention. so you're going to have that rowling, add to that what i always see in obama's numbers is that 10%, about 10% depression among whites, and installation of a 2% among whites but there is that -- spent let me just pull down two things i think everyone heard you say -- when you said blacks hate republicans, right? i can go back to goldwater in 64 and the civil rights act. i can go through all of that, but then you come forward in time, and, of course, i think actually george h. w. bush did pretty well in terms of 15% with black voters, i think colin powell, condoleezza rice, i think of the tremendous attack on george w. bush by the end of

the naacp, to make sure the black voters did not go to him. he had done very well with black voters. but in the current environment, is it wrong to assume that, as you put it, because the incumbent is a black guy, that black voters wouldn't respond to him? and i've heard so much from people who say he has not performed for black voters. do you buy that? >> well, no, i don't buy that necessarily. i think that there is, you have a president -- there's no way, this is an extraordinary period in american history where the economy was going off a cliff, and how you pulled back means that you have to make choices, and you can't make choices -- you can't pursue everybody's priorities.

so where are there areas where communism people thought he could've done better? of course, i'm chief among them. but are there places where he did make significant -- i think affordable health care, obamacare, is significant as a piece of legislation that helps minorities in particular, and in particular lack people. i think you have to look at each piece of legislation, each kind of victory from the white house, and look at how that thing, even though it does not have a black face on it, or a hispanic face or whatever, how it helps minority communities. >> but do you think -- >> so people then turn and say, let's see, black unemployment rate is much higher than the white on the planet right. well, there were a few times in

history where, i don't think -- when you take that back. where black unemployment rate is always higher than the white unemployment rate. there are a few times in history where, when it gets as worse as a possibly good for whites does across the line up where where it gets when it gets as good as possibly it does for black. when it's at its highs, it rarely crosses the point where, when it's at its lowest for black people. we always are in recession. right? so, this idea that he was supposed to rectify hundreds and hundreds of years of the black recession in america, it's just ridiculous on some level. what we have to look at and say, when it comes to unemployment, the election will be about the trend of the line.

is this the line moving in the right direction. it won't be fixed. it will be fixed for black people. it won't be fixed for white people. it won't be fit for anybody. it won't be back to a normal unemployment rate. >> we'll come back to this topic because it's very rich. the other comment you made accountable detention was about whites and what you said with regard to wide support for this president insult i believe was the word you use. i think he got 43% of the white vote in '08. what do you think is the cause of the softening of white support for president obama? >> i can't -- okay. trying to get me in trouble here, juan. well okay, first, i think you have to look at voting in support as separate things. so, he gets fortysomething percent, but as soon as he takes

off, to support among whites, it's really hard. it's like 60, 70, somewhere like that. they may not have been willing to vote for him, but when he is elected, they like the guy. right? what we see now is they like the guy. so how that translates at the voting booth, i don't exactly know. if it is a corollary between how you voted before and how you like them immediately afterwards, and if you try both those lines in the same breath, it will be catastrophic or i don't think that will be the case. i think people will line up and say the situation between two people, you know, romney the robot or barack obama, i don't know which one want to go with. i think i will go with obama, you know, i will hold my nose and i will do. some of us will. however, i do believe that communism this has become, race has become such a partisan

issue. raise has always -- race has always had an underpinning in politics. there was a moral component to the race discussion. the election of barack obama has essentially stripped away the entire moral underpinning of the conversation. so all that you're left with is this hyper partisan discussion of race as an issue. the moment you even bring up the idea of race in america, you immediately have people fall into partisan positions about who's doing what for whom or who's doing what to whom, from political perspectives, not from moral perspectives. and and i think that that is how a lot of people have come to see

this president. they don't see him overtly -- their abjection is not overtly racist. i mean, that is such a loaded word, but i do believe that race sneaks its way into their assessment of him in kind of infected ways, not implicit ways, about how, you know, the country has failed racially, on the racial front altogether, any kind of fatigue with the topic of race, and he starts to embody that fatigue. and i think that part of it, and not all of it, there some people, if you're a small government, conservative who believes in a strong military, small set of social services, that's just the way you believe it and it has nothing to do with

this or whatever, but add on to that what i always say is that 10% for and against, suppressed about 10% among whites, inflated about 10% among blacks. that 10%, it sneaks in. and whether they articulate it or not i think that part israel. >> all right, let me go to norm. norm, i want you to pick up on that, but i particularly, after you respond to what charles was saying, pick up on this notion of a softening of the white vote and give us an idea of what it is that white voters look right now to be disenchanted with the incumbent. >> sure. i think the problem that barack obama has had its working-class rights because, frankly, probably the democrats of that in a global way, working-class whites is particularly acute in the south. and what charles was saying, it to me brings back the century

old set of tension where you had pipers movements in the south going back to reconstruction and even just a little bit after, trying to unite poor people who have a lot in common because they were oppressed by a small group of elite. and the race card was played, and created those divisions that carried through the south, certainly at least until the '60s, '70s. we still have those tensions now. one of the real question here is whether mitt romney can continue the appeal to working-class whites outside the south, given his image and the things that he has been saying, that certainly make populace kind of salivate, when you could go to the holding of the whites having alex and i would like to fire people, i don't quite know how much my net worth is within 50 mendoza.

all of that is not designed to appeal to the working-class whites, and i think one of the question is whether race becomes played more overtly with a group to try to create more of a witch, and if it does then we will see more of these racial tensions play out. let me just, a couple of additional points along -- >> try to narrow it. >> i will make it quick. you know, if we look beyond trayvon martin, the supreme court that just heard obamacare is going to hear and probably rule on what remains of affirmative action in higher education. and there's pretty clear signal that on a 5-for michael, the five republican justices and the majority, the four democratic appointed justices not, they will throw out the delicate balance that sandra day o'connor built in, there goes affirmative action. the voting rights act section five which is pretty clear and provision which are very much in the news, both because of the

voter laws that charles mentioned, involving id but also redistricting, and that's a pretty clear signals from chief justice roberts from previous decisions that it's just a matter of time and probably the time when they throw out the private voting rights act. if you think that racial issues for african-americans have been high before, just wait if we get those decisions coming before the election. >> and have the arizona case on immigration. >> yes. and just a point on the asian americans. we had goodwin liu nominated a smart features as you will ever find for court of appeals rejected on a filibuster by republicans. we have got the energy secretary, an asian-american, nobel prize winner who has been a punching bag for republicans because of the solyndra and other issues. we may see if those issues become heightened, and

particularly with chu, the particular efforts to try to focus on the energy department. .. >> thank you to the opponent for selling out america to china, and that got flashed all across the asian community. it wasn't just the chinese community. took great offense at this notion that somehow, you know, people are going to be running against them by using race in that way. so i do think, i mean, it surprises me. i feel like the republicans have

a death wish in the long term, that they're ignoring the demographics in going after in a very personal way, gratuitously almost, both asians and latinos. you had romney going after, for example, the latina who's on the supreme court very gratuitously. didn't need to, but somehow trying to bait his base. and i thought it was crazy until i realized what the republicans apparently have decided to do is they're not going to go after that vote. instead, their going to -- they're going to try to keep minorities from voting, and those were the laws he was referring to. and it's not just the new identification laws. those are crazy enough, but cutting back on voter registration, not allowing a vote on sundays when they know that black churches used to turn out their congregations. all of these things, you know, shutting down. it's so difficult to register people in florida to vote

legally because you have to turn in your registrations at a certain hour of the day almost, it's so complicated to understand. even the league of women voters is saying they're not going to do voter registration in florida. all of that is very intentional. all of that with, you know, the attack on unions in wisconsin and across to try to defund the unions, the unions who have been the engine, the financial engine and, quite frankly, the only groups who cared about trying to get out latino and african-americans and asian votes has been unions, so the attack on them has been very direct. it seems to me, okay, the decision has been we don't think we can get these votes -- even though i think they're wrong -- we're going to suppress their vote as much as possible, hope we whip up enough of our base. and i also think they're wrong about whites. i think they're selling short white voters. i think they're assuming that white voters are going to bite the racial bait, and they're ignoring the amount of

interracial marriage that is now happening. 9% of whites are now intermarried. much higher even in the younger generation. so it's not just the growing minority vote, but where is the white vote eventually going to go when their families are going to become increasingly multicultural, increasingly look like the rest of america? >> so in, from what i'm hearing from the three of you, you see race as absolutely driving much of the politics this campaign season, that there's no getting away from racial discussions even though we already have a black president to pick up, again, on something i think david said about the paradox that the more progress we make, it seems the farther we have to go, or we realize how far we have to go. so race is absolutely at the forefront of this, and let me shift here for a second to say in response to you, karen, but

isn't it the case that candidate romney, the front runner right now but looks to be the inevitable nominee, that he would be the inevitable nominee, is responding to what an overwhelmingly white republican party wants from its candidate? they are, in fact, angry over high levels of immigration. they are, in fact, concerned about an us -- an increase in the size of government and entitlement spending. they are, n., concerned about china owning american debt and playing a larger role in the american economy as well as a military power or counter to america's dominance, so isn't romney responding? the professor mentioned the generational divide. older americans, largely white. younger americans, largely people of color and the immigrants. so isn't he responding appropriately to represent what his party's base wants? >> i think he's responding to a

segment of the republican party. i say there's the south, and there's everybody else. i mean, if you look at intermarriage rates, all of those things that look at integration, the south is still the south. the new south -- >> although intermarriage rates are highest in the south. >> for blacks, but not for -- >> for blacks. >> -- for anybody else, right? >> for blacks. >> and you have outposts, if you count texas, you have houston, you have atlanta, you have a few outposts that are more international, but it's still really the south, and you can see that in the incredibly crazy local immigration laws that got passed, right? that in alabama they were trying to keep kids from going to school. they're trying to keep people from being able to get utilities. they're trying to get -- they supposedly aggregate any contract you make with someone who's undocumented. really way stepped over the line, right? the south is the south. there's a whole bunch of republicans.

remember, there are, you know, three latino republican governors, there are two asian republican governors, right? two of them are in the south. how did that happen? they are being forced in a box. when the dream act got voted on in the house, the only republicans who voted with the democrats to pass it in the house, guess what? the asian, the vietnamese-american republican and the two cuban-american republicans. they are becoming a lonely voice, and the question for the republicans is do they want to go back to the big tent party of reagan which, if i were them, that's what i would be doing because i still think blacks and latinos, socially conservative, asians fiscally conservative, they could still get them. or are they going to play to this increasingly narrow, rabid part of their base? >> well, hang on. >> more than the rapid part of their base. >> all right. but, charles, let me come to you and say i think that there are people who feel under siege by

immigrants in this country who think this is not the america they grew up in, and they feel like, you know, somebody needs to be a voice for them. and much of that has come in terms of the republican base from an element we would identify as the tea party. saying, you know what? this is not illegitimate, this is not racist to say. these immigrants are flooding in here, we have too many immigrants of all kinds, but specifically undocumented immigrants. and so why is that somehow wrong-headed to say? and why does it invite then this racial backlash from blacks, asians and hispanics? >> well, okay, first of all, it's never going to be the country you grew up in ever again. [laughter] all you have to do is look at a census bureau report and look at projections. it's never going to be. and that, i think, scares people to death. and i think that what is happening is that republicans are banking at least in the short term on the us versus them

politics which is the only way to preserve your way of life is circle the wagons. and that means that it's anti everything. it's anti-immigrant, it's anti-entitlement. i mean, if ours, our way of life, our money, our tax money, everything is being taken from us, given to them, and we want to reverse that trend, right? and so that's -- and whether or not that a works is the question in the short term. it can't work long term. there's no -- you can't look -- there's no fighting the math, right? you can't look at the numbers and believe that as a long-term strategy this works. >> let me just interrupt you. >> yes. >> you're saying this is a naked racial appeal by the republicans -- >> no, no, no. this is, you know, when you look at particularly, look at republican primary voters.

that is the last bastion of white voting in -- >> well -- >> no, even the -- >> charles, but that's true. you're true! but so what? >> let me finish. even though what they're doing is playing to the worst fears among that population, and i think that that is a, that part is naked, that it's a place of fear, and it is the fear of, you know, the boogeyman out there, the "them" bogeyman, and it's you, the only way you can have what you had when you grew up in the '50s or '60s is for us to keep this country as close to that ideal as possible which is an impossible thing to do on the math. however, you can look at ways to try to reverse immigration trends, or you can look at ways

to try to diminish entitlement programs or whatever. and that's interesting. if that's the tack they want to take, they can take it. what the gamble is, is can you grow the resentment that exists among the poorest of, less educated of the white population into the working class and even higher into the electorate? so if you look at the appalachian vote, for instance, so that is the closest kind of poorest vote more closely resembles immigrant population, african-american populations because they're all just getting started. therefore, poor whites, poor whites in appalachia, they're poorer, blacks are poorer, immigrants just starting, a lot of them are poor. they voted very, very differently in 2008. there's, like, 410, i think, counties in appalachia, stretches all the way from the

top of alabama to new york. western parts of new york. barack obama won, like, 44, i think, of those counties. that was fewer than any democratic candidate in recent history. those people are just like no matter what my economic situation, i'm just not in for it. >> you're not voting for the black guy. >> i'm not voting for this guy -- >> okay. >> -- you know, for whatever reason that is. and what they're trying to do is figure out how do we grow that fear among -- >> republicans. >> yes. and take advantage of it up the economic. >> all right. norm? >> to get back to your question, just a few points. first is, immigration is a vexing issue, and it has been for many decades. we saw a bipartisan bill pass about 20 year ago. the idea was you're going to have some form of amnesty for people who have come in illegally before, and then we're going to make sure we secure our

borders and it, obviously, didn't work very well. but the same problem remains. we've got 12 million or so people who are here with their families illegally, most of them have been here for a very long time, they've established lives, they have jobs, they pay taxes, and dealing with them is not an easy thing to do. so that's one thing. second is many of the fears that you mention are heightened whenever you have a lousy economic situation and high unemployment, and people suddenly see a competition for jobs that they didn't see before with illegal immigrants. mostly they're wrong. they're still wrong. it's jobs that nobody else will take or want. and what we're seeing now is we get a crackdown, we're finding gaps. we're not having our food, our fruit being picked, our vegetables being picked. we don't have the migrant workers who come in and do things, back-breaking jobs for very little money that nobody else wants to do. we have got big problems on that front. i've been waiting for somebody

to do a movie like "it's a wonderful life" where we look at what our society would be like if all of a sudden all 12 million left, and we would find that the society was a little like potterville, i'm afraid. so that's one part of it. a second part of this is just to look at how far the republican party has gone. it was john mccain and lindsey graham who led an effort to find a bipartisan approach that was along the same lines as simpson-my solely. we're going to find a way to take those who are here and act in both a humane and practical fashion, and we're going to find ways to tighten up on the borders. we're also, by the way, going to enhance legal immigration because that's been the basic reason that this country is as great as it is today that they don't have in europe or japan or other places. and you look at a rick perry, not your idea of a raving liberal. basically thrown totally on the defensive because as a practical matter as a governor with the

long border with mexico, he tried to come up with some way of making sure that you educated illegals who happen to be in texas. that as much as anything drove him down from a strong position in the race. you look at even the attacks that newt gingrich got when he talked about, well, maybe the grandmothers who are here, we can find a way maybe not to leave the citizenship, but at least to legality. and that came under siege. and then you look at romney's position on immigration and talking about self-deportation, and be it tells you that what was a bipartisan approach to the issue just no longer exists. and there are legitimate concerns. this is a real and important issue and a vexing problem, there is no doubt about it. but you now have a party that is driven by a narrow portion of its base, and this is a short-term concern getting through primaries and winning a nomination. how you can then pivot back when

you are forced into a position that's so far over to one that becomes more reasonable. and forget just about the election dynamics of it. we've got to solve this problem or at least cope with it as a society. and if we get into a situation as we are now where you're not even calibrating on who's supported, where you're going to start to as we are now seeing cracking down on employers because they've hired illegals, and they don't have much other option. and we may see restaurants closing or other things happening. it's going to create an explosive situation, and it's just another one of those issues and a set of issues where we've moved so far apart that's what required, which is a bipartisan approach. the dream act was thoroughly bipartisan, now it's not. >> right. >> and it tells us a lot about the polarization of politics as it plays out with the polarization -- >> it's the polarization of the republican party, though, that's the thing that's interesting me. when we were taking students around the hill, republicans who

actually were sympathetic to the issue who had actually been co-sponsors earlier on were, basically, saying they were afraid to vote for it because -- not because it would hurt them in the general election, but because they're atrade that someone would be -- afraid that someone would be run to their right. >> okay. let me stop us here because we've gotten so strong on this point that race is going to be a defining factor in this campaign. let's bring the audience in for their questions. i see we have microphones, two microphones. and, again, if you could be pointed not to deliver a lecture. this topic invites that, but a pointed question, we would be delighted to take it and consider it. while people are coming to the microphones, let me come back to something that i was saying to charles blow with you, norm, which as i said white voters are genuinely anxious, especially as you see it represented in the base of the republican party, the tea party element about high

levels of immigration, about growth of government, about entitlement spending. why is it illegitimate for anybody to represent that point of view? >> it's certainly not illegitimate to represent that point of view. you've got two questions that get raised by it though. one is, is it going to be colossally stupid to represent that point of view so strongly that you both in the short run lose votes, but in the long run given the demographics that we've seen both in the slides and from what karen and charles have been talking about, you're going to force yourself into a position of a minority party for a very long period of time. >> yeah, but wait a second. you and i both know it's about winning now, not looking down the road. >> yeah. >> and so potentially by playing to those anxieties and saying these are legitimate anxieties, and i'm trying to help resolve these issues, mitt romney could become president of the united states. >> he could. but what we see right now among the swing voters, get beyond that base. he's appealed so much to that

base that he's seen his support among swing voters erode. and, of course, it starts with women, with the contraception issue. it moves to other swing voters because the shrillness of the rhetoric is starting to make them uneasy. so you've got to be very careful about how you do it in the short run. >> you can represent those issues, it's just how do you present the solution. >> that's right. >> or you could present it as it's us versus them, or we're going to come together because we're incredible as american people, and we can find a solution together. that's the challenge. >> intolerance in general is a slippery slope that leads to an abyss. so you start with us versus them on immigration, and you take a hard line. you start with, you lead to, you know, we want to cut wic and the things that help to feed poor children who can't feed themselves, and you keep going. and that leads to things like women should not be able to access contraception when they

want it. you go, it leads so far in the wrong direction that you start to alienate so many pockets of voters that you only have a few left. and you can't -- that is not a winning strategy. winning a national presidential election is always about winning the middle. you're always going to have your line up on either side. you have to be able to swing the middle. and what you're doing is setting up a situation where you're almost destined to lose the middle unless you, basically, you do your etch a sketch thing and make everybody forget that their youtube exists and say i never said all that stuff. i said it, but i didn't mean it, whatever. you cannot win the middle. and that's the problem that i think republicans will have. >> don mathis from community action. >> hi, juan. karen actually stole my question, but, juan, i can accept the antecedent that

there's anxiety that has to be expressed. what troubles is the consequence. what do you act on that? if somebody has legitimate concern about their livelihood being taken away, but if their solution is to chain somebody to the back of a pickup truck and drive them three miles down the road, i'm not sure that's the response. is there any way to restore civility to the differences that we have? nobody's justifying racism, but the fact it's perceived differently, what's become so distressing is the lack of civility, the hate that's involved. i watched you on tv, juan, in south carolina during that debate where i thought the audience was, you know, lets kill him, let the guy die without medical insurance. that kind of vitriol is so damaging to our country. is there any hope that we can have the discussion about anxiety in a way that doesn't breed more hate and contempt? >> charles. [laughter] >> throw that to me.

well, i mean, here's the thing. i mean, the idea of discussing race requires a precept that we don't necessarily always employ which is that it takes being able to look at the same set of facts from different points of view. and what we choose to do is to look at them from our own self-interested points of view, right? so if, if i look at race only as immigrants coming in making my neighborhoods, or at least i perceive them as making it unsafe and taking away jobs we would otherwise have, blah, blah, blah, that's the only way i can understand that issue. the other side of the issue is immigrants, according to polls, are the most enterprising people in the country. they're the most likely to start a small business. these are exactly the kinds of people that you want in the country. these are the people who will do

work that no one else will do. these are people who, you know, generally have more intact families. these are exactly the kinds of people you should want in the country. being able to look at one set of facts and say i can understand your side of this issue, will you allow for mine and that both things can exist, and then we can start having a conversation about, you know, how much do we give or take on this issue is kind of a civility that i think has kind of e evaporated from te entire discussion. and so now we can't even, you know, everything is entitlements and, you know, blah people. you know, that kind of slip of the tongue, you know, very poor children, we know he's talking about don't have a habit of going to work unless it's

something criminal, and there's nobody in their neighborhoods who works. i mean, who says this sort of stuff? because there's just no way to look at that set of facts objectively and say that what you're saying is true. you're just saying that, newt gingrich, to try to enflame racial tensions. that is the only reason that anybody would let that come out of your mouth. >> but, karen, it worked. i believe he won south carolina. >> he won south carolina -- >> nothing said. >> it's the south. >> no choice, i'm sorry. >> you know, i look upon it as one of the fears in addition to the changing demographics of the u.s., right, is globalization. there is a real impact. and the reality is you can't even keeping ature in this country -- agriculture now in this country because the response to shutting down immigration was for agricultural companies to actually start whying land -- buying land in mexico, saying, okay, if we can't get the cheap labor here, we're going to follow the cheap labor.

i would love to see the business leaders step up and say, the business leaders who control some of the purses, the money that goes into the pacs, that frenzy, you know, some of the worst of the ads that go out on the air say, enough, you know? the business leaders stepping up and saying this is not good for america. this is not good for our business. we're going to stand up, and we're going to call for rational conversation to solve these problems, and we're going to hold people accountable. they're not going to get our money if they do be down this road. >> charlie farst. >> i just wondered if you had evidence or research on whether particularly asians vote because of their ethnicity versus economic or other issues. in other words, do we know what triggers the asian vote and then other minority votes, groups' votes? >> thanks for the question. there's a little bit of study that's been happening, some of it from academics. in fact, there's going to be a

study that gets done in september and a study that just came out that shows the challenge for asians is we have a lot of immigrants, right? so 60% of our community is foreign born, and what we're seeing, though, is that in each election 30% of the asians voting are actually voting for the first time, and they're newly-naturalized citizens. so what will get them to vote is the outreach, is investment in outreach where they hear from leaders whether it's their church leaders or a temple leader, whoever, community service agencies explaining to them how the elected official connects to whether they get a youth center or senior center or sufficient funding for schools which are so important to asian-americans. that's what drives asian-americans out to vote. the asian-american justice center that i just retired from

is actually working, and we're going to be coming out with a poll to ask that question to see how asians are looking at this election and what's going to motivate them to vote. >> we have another question. >> yes. all, my name is paul dornan. question about the disjuncture between the trends that i hear you talking about and if you look at makeup of state legislatures that if you look at the makeup of congress, that there is a different trend that seems to be occurring, and that is that republicans are winning all over the place. and that the whole question of whether we're going to have a continuation if the trends that you're talking about in the which we have key sided government -- divided government kind of for the foreseeable

future related to the differences in terms of turnout, intensity, all of the kinds of things that determine local voting as opposed to the national vote. >> i think, you know, a couple of answers to that. first is republicans are winning everywhere, but a large part of that is a sweep in 2010 where they had unprecedented gains at the state legislative level and picked up 63 seats in the house of representatives which was the most in our lifetimes at least. whether that continues remains to be seen. what's also clear, though, is, one, we have an almost evenly-divided country by and large. democrats have a little bit of an edge that has been mitigated against by differential turnout. but it's evenly divide it's not evenly divided across the country, it varies across states and regions. but what we also see is something that charles mentioned. in many states now we're seeing where republicans had the sweep,

have all the reins of power that we're getting laws enacted to tilt the voting population in a direction that will give them a longer-term advantage despite the fact that they might not otherwise win a lot of these elections. and part of it is we are unique in this world in that we have partisan election officials. our secretaries of state in the states are partisans. no other country does this. everybody else has independent, usually career people who handle these things. that makes a difference. but we also see changes in laws designed to suppress some kinds of votes and enhance others. and that may provide a level of leverage that could make a difference down the road. and i'd just make one final point which is that the polarization that we have seen in congress, ideological and partisan, the kind of tribal politics here have clearly me

metastasized across to a very large numbers of states and now into localities. and you see these divisions in wisconsin writ large now, but they played out in my native minnesota where you had a shutdown in the government that was very similar to what the kind of confrontation that we had here over the debt limit and the shutdown in the '90s. we are seeing it in the state after state after state. we've seen it in florida, we've seen it in ohio. and in michigan. and we're not going to get out of this for some period of time. in the short run, amaliefyed by a media -- amplified by a media that make a lot of money off of dramatic differences and extreme views from talk radio on through cable news and others. just fasten your seat belts. this bumty ride is going to continue for some time. >> but also national politics and for the president and to some degree senate elections are a little bit different from the house elections and from

statewide house, you know, assembly elections because the way that the boundaries have been redrawn with redistricting will benefit republicans in the house not necessarily in the senate because it's still a statewide election. the other thing, though, is to remember that even if democrats hold a slight advantage nationally in terms of party id, republicans consistent -- i mean, conservatives consistently hold, like, a 2 to 1 advantage over liberals when it comes to how people feel. and i think that that still has to be taken into account. the country does, is much more conservative. most of that's social issues, than liberal. >> but it's still, the center is

still vital in the country as a whole. it's just not vital in our politics. and those senate elections look add what happened to bob bennett, look at what happened to lisa murkowski, look at what happened to mike cassel in delaware, look at what might happen to orrin hatch and to in the senate race with dick lieu daughter in -- lugar in indiana. we're seeing, basically, an ec to magnet -- ec toe magnet force even if broader electorate doesn't necessarily feel that way. >> i see charlie firestone standing there, so i think that means our time has come to an end. this has really been an eye opener in terms of the important role that race will play in this 2012 race. thank you all, charles, karen, norm, thanks very much. [applause]

>> thanks for a very interesting panel. the next panel is going to be on the latino vote, so we're going to get more in detail on that. we're going to take a 15-minute break. when we come back, i believe c-span moves from c-span2 to c-span 1. the rest of us will just move for refreshment and come back. we'll start promptly at 10:45. thank you. >> well done. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

>> the aspen institute is holding this all-day similar pose yum on the -- symposium on the state of race in america, wrapping up the first session looking at how politics impacts race relations. as you heard, our coverage are shift over to c-span in about 15 minutes from now starting with a discussion on the latino vote and the 2012 presidential election. later today starting at noon eastern immigration and immigration policies and their impact on race relations. after a lunch break, we'll hear a discussion on education and how to close the achievement gap between white and minority students, and that'll start at about 2:15 eastern. about 3:40, the news media's impact on what role the media

should play in trying to bridge social and racial differences. again, our all-day coverage starts about 10:45 eastern on our companion network, c-span. all this week in prime time on c-span2 we're featuring some of booktv's weekend programming. tonight, a look at pearl harbor and the american entry into world war ii. starting at 8:30 eastern, author craig shirley with december 1941. at 9:20, stanley weintraub's "pearl harbor christmas: a world at war." and at about 10:15, burt and anita folsom discuss their book, fdr goes to war: how expanding power and civil liberties shaped wartime america. starting at 8 p.m. eastern on c-span2. >> tonight on c-span c-span pbss smiley leads a discussion on poverty in america and its effects on women and children. >> tavis, there's a number in the fact sheet i shared with

folks. in 1990 the average member of congress had a net worth of $250,000 excluding their home. by 2010 the average member of congress had a net worth of $750,000 excluding their home. so what happened to congress that they could triple their wealth in just a 20-year period? meanwhile, for the rest of us the average person had income excluding their home of about $20,000 both in 1990 and in 2010. so everybody else stayed level, but these members of congress found a way to enrich themselves. i'm not hating on members of congress, i'm not hating on wealth. but here's what i'm saying. people who have that kind of wealth don't understand somebody who needs an extra $0 in their bi-- $40 in their biweekly check -- [applause] >> you can watch the whole event tonight starting at 8 p.m. eastern on c-span. >> hydraulic fracking is a process of extracting natural

gas and oil from rock deposits, and it's been credited with attracting u.s. manufacturing. last week scientists from the u.s. geological survey spoke about this new process and explained how it's been connected with recent earthquakes in ohio along with circumstances that can lead to that muchal gas leaking into people's drinking water. some states have sought to slow down fracking over health and safety concerns. [background sounds] >> for allowing us to use this broadcast to give you a little bit of an understanding just what hydraulic fracturing is, and at this time i'd like to introduce doug duncan, the associate coordinator for the u.s. energy resources program. and doug was first attracted to geology when his parents hauled him around as a kid collecting rocks on many different field trips. and after getting geology

degrees from the university of georgia and penn state, doug worked cleaning up nuclear waste in washington state, also pent time looking for oil and gas as a geophysicist for exxon and managing environmental research and monitoring at the nevada test site before coming to the usgs. and doug will address us tonight on increasing, the increasing role that unconventional oil and gas resources play in our nation's petroleum endowment. >> thanks, dave. okay. welcome, everybody. thanks for coming out tonight. i'm going to talk about unconventional oil and gas assessments in the united states, and i want to talk about this for several reasons. one is to set the stage for the following two talks, but also just to give you an idea of what role hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, directional drilling play in enabling the production of these so-called unconventional resources.

and i'll start out by saying that the nation is still very dependent upon fossil fuels including oil and gas, and in particular gas provides about 25% of the supply of energy that our country uses every day. and this particular diagram shows about where that gas comes from. because it comes from different sources. and on the left-hand side of the graph, the data, the line in the middle is for 2010, and that's the most recent data that we have from the energy information administration. and the, and you can see that there are a number of different sources. some of these are conventional, and some are unconventional. and unconventional resources, as dave said, are those that take a special technology like hydrofracking, horizontal drilling, directional drilling and others in order to produce from these very tight or very

imper mall formations at depth. and so the shale gas is one of those sources. tight gas, that'd be sand and carbonates and others, and methane in the green there is sometimes fracked in order to produce the gas. the other sources are conventional sources, and you can see that there our production domestically of those sources is in decline. and so that's why the long-time use of hydrofracking for tight gas and then the more recent use of it for shale gas is so important. you can see if you subtracted those wedges that we would have a much less, much less domestic production, and we would have to be importing nat gas to replus that production. replace that production. the usgs then, our role is to

try to, one of our roles is to try to assess how much undiscovered gas might be out there yet to be discovered using current geologic knowledge and technology. and to go back to this slide, this is all on the right-hand side a projection. in order to make that projection, you need to have an assessment of how much gas is yet to be discovered. so we use standardized methodologies that are based on a geologic model that we prepare, and then we apply some statistical or problem listic -- probablistic approaches to try to estimate how much gas might be out there to be discovered. and it's an uncertain business which is why we use these probablistic approaches. and we use because of the transparency of our methodologies and the consistency of our methodologies, our assessments are used by a wide variety of people including land managers of our federal lands, our

congress and state congressional delegations, for example, the public, nongovernmental organizations and as well as industry. so let me ten back just a little -- step back just a little bit so that we understand what an unconventional resource a little bit better. this is sort of a cross-section through the earth. conventional oil and gas resources occur in pools or reservoirs that are constrained on the top and on the sides by impermeable zones. and they often have an oil-water contact or a gas-water contact. and unconventional resources we've technically referred to them as continuous resources. we say that because the oil resource of the gas resource is distributed continuously through the formation at depth. and it's held in the rock because rock is so empire meal or tight -- impermeable or tight

you these to use external drilling to extract the resource. one example of a resource assessment is our recently-completed marcellus shale gas assessment in the northeastern united states. being from this area you've probably heard of it, or maybe not. but at the bottom i list what our mean estimate which was 84 trillion cubic feet of gas, but i also show our estimate is it could be as low as 42 trillion cubic feet or as high as 144 trillion cubic feet. so, again, this illustrates the uncertainty with some of these methodologies and these are estimates, after all. what do we do with these assessments after we're done? this, these maps that i show here, the lower right one is a compilation of the assessments that we have done of a number of unconventional resources, gas

resources in the united states. and you can see that, um, there's -- maybe you can't read the number, but there's quite a bit of gas. it's over 600 trillion cubic feet. and in the upper left is our map of the conventional resources. and with the exception of the gulf coast and alaska, there is not much left to be discovered. that means that most of these basins are mature exploration provinces, and can there's simply not much left to be found. and be that is why that graph that i showed you on the first slide had declining production from those conventional resources and why the unconventional resources are so attractive as an exla ration -- exploration target. this isn't the whole story. i was just talking about onshore, u.s. and state waters. our for bureau at the department of interior, the bureau of ocean energy management, uses very

similar techniques to the ones that we use at the usgs for estimating undiscovered resources offshore, the outer continental shelf. and that ends up being a fairly large resource, and i want to point out that this is a conventional resource. there's so far no economic incentive to go to the expense of doing the hydrofracking and that sort of thing offshore. but when you put all of that together, and i sort of put it together here for our domestic resources, undiscovered resources, adds up to over 1400 trillion cubic feet of gas, a fairly substantial amount of gas. i don't know if you noticed on the first, again, on the first slide, i didn't point it out, but our domestic, um, production is about 22 trillion cubic feet a year. i want to change, now, from talking about gas to talking about oil. we also do oil assessments.

we do unconventional oil assessments because these type formations sometimes as well contain oil. the most commonly known one is the williston basin of north dakota and montana. and that's illustrated here at about our mean estimate is about 3.64 billion barrels of oil which is a substantial oil resource. we still have not completed all of our assessments, and so this map will be updated over the next year. i want to just turn briefly to this map from the energy information administration to show that shale basins or shale formations occur throughout the united states. not everywhere, but looking at a map like this in combination with our resources estimates gives planners and policymakers an idea of where future production might occur in addition to the ongoing production that we have right now and be able to predict where

infrastructure might need to be built, for example, or where impacts might need to be mitigated. i want to just leave you with this worldwide look. talked about resources within the united states. those are undiscovered resources. there's another category of natural gas which is stuff we've already found. so far i've just been talking about what we haven't found yet, but what we're estimating is out there. what we have in terms of proved reserves in north america is about 346 trillion cubic feet of gas, but you can see there are much larger reserves in other parts of the world, particularly eurasia, russia in particular and the middle east. and then finally, just to give you an idea of what the change or the boom in production in some of these basins is, i'm going to show you an animated

map of the williston basin and the development of the bakken formation. and you can see the history on the lower left corner of that graph. [background sounds] >> well, as you can see, quite an increase in the number of wells over a relatively few number of years. thank you very much, doug, for the presentation. our second speaker tonight is dennis, a hydrologist and groundwater specialist with the usgs in pennsylvania since 1988. he is currently working on projects to estimate groundwater recharge rates, model groundwater/surfacewater interactions and sample baseline water quality of streams and

wells in some area of marcellus shale gas development in pennsylvania. dennis received a master's degree from indiana university, bachelor's degree from miami university, and dennis tonight will discuss some of the major water availability and quality challenges associated with natural gas development with a focus on the marcellus shale in pennsylvania. >> thank you, dave. i'd like to talk about some water issues tonight associated with the marcellus shale, and doug ended up showing the gas boom in the bakken shale in north dakota and montana. similar things happening here in pennsylvania where i'm from. this map shows that in the last five years, there have been 10,000 sites permitted for marcellus shale wells in the state of pennsylvania. and 5,000 of those sites have

actually been drilled. so a significant boom in drilling so curing. and associate -- so curing. and associated with that are, of course, some related water issues. part of what's happening in pennsylvania that's interesting is that, you know, it's a state that's not a stranger to oil and gas development. but the northeast part of the state is, really has not experienced historic development of oil and gas resources. so everything's pretty new in the northeastern part of pennsylvania. so i'm going to talk about a few of the water issues that i think are interesting that i'm hearing on the news, and i'm hearing come across my desk. the first is erosion and sedimentation. so erosion and sedimentation can occur well before any hydraulic fracturing occurs and before the well is drilled. we have to have a pad and an access road. and you can see on this slide

which is in a pretty undisturbed area in a state forest in pennsylvania that the well pad is a significant footprint on the landscape. the marcellus well pads tend to be pretty large compared to conventional oil and gas well pads. this is about three to eight acres, depending upon how water is handled. in this slide you can see that the water actually is stored in a pond right off the path. the roads tend to be large to handle all the truck traffic that needs to go up and down transporting water and chemicals to the site. you can see in this slide that a lot of -- well, at least in this case the development's occurring on pretty rugged terrain, so any surface disruption can easily cause erosion, sedimentation if proper mitigation's not done. now, those very large well pads, they concentrate the industrial activity to that one large,

disturbed area. but they do have the advantage many that multiple laterals can be drilled from that same well pad. so a lot of the shale can be accessed from one location on the surface that's disturbed. in this case you can see a well that's planned with five laterals, about 3-5,000 feet in len, and i've heard as laterals going out as far as 9,000 feet. this is a planned gas field buildout in a state forest where you can see how the, um, the development can be planned in a way that doesn't create much of a foot print on the landscape. this is a 9,000-acre development or lease. that's almost 15 square miles that's going to be tapped with only 15 well pads on the surface. so to put that in perspective, a more conventional type of

exploration or well field buildout using 80 acre centers or 80-acre spacings of the wells would look something like this. and there'd be ten times or more well pads on the land surface. so the number of wells is a big deal, especially when you consider that each one of the wells has to have an access road and a pipeline which, again, you're disturbing the surface, you're causing forest tagmentation -- fragmentation and the possibility of erosion and sedimentation. so any way that the surface disruption can be minimized is a good thing. and gas operators are trying to do that in many cases. spills and leaks. certainly, something that's not restricted to the oil and gas industry, but it's definitely a water concern. we have a lot of water being handled, injected at high pressures on these pads, chemicals are being used along with the water. lots of truck traffic to transport these materials, so

lots of opportunities for spills and leaks. on some of the pads that i've visited, we see the operators trying to mitigate the possibility of any leaks or spills by things like these liners and berms. as an example of a pad where the water and the drill cuttings are held in ponds, surface ponds. and, of course, even if those ponds are lined which they almost always are, you worry about is the liner leaking, or are the ponds likely to be over top? what i've seen in the field, the wells that i've visited have containerized all of their handling of water and drilling fluids like the drilling mud. so that these yellow tanks would be tanks that instead of having ponds, the tanks are holding the water on site that's going to be used for the hydraulic fracturing. so then they can keep the water

in closed-loop system and minimize any potential for leaks and spills. same with the cutting. when you drill a well, you're using a drilling mud that's down in the hole with the bit, and the bit's grinding up the rock, and those rock cuttings come up. again, they try to containerize and keep the mud in a closed-loop system where they can continually recycle the mud, drop the rock cuttings out, put those in a container, stabilize them, send them to the landfill. in pennsylvania i'm told that pennsylvania landfills take about a million tons of drill cuttings per year. hydraulic fracturing, that's what we hear on the news all the time. water concerns about the hydraulic fracturing procedure. a lot of the issues that i hear involve the amount of water that's used which is considerable. the chemicals that are used along with the water and sand. what happens to that water when

it's injected in the ground, and then what's the quality of the water when it flows back to the surface. so i'll touch briefly on those issues. the amount of water used for hydraulic fracturing according to us we hanna river -- susquehanna river basin commission averages about four and a half million gallons per well, and even the 32% water that comes from public supplies which is purchased from water purveyors, most of that's from surface water supplies too. so very little groundwater being used in pennsylvania for hydraulic fracturing. here you see a holding pond that's being used to -- they're filling it for use for hydraulic fracturing. that pond holds five million gallons of water. each one of those trucks in the picture down below, actually those trucks are feeding into the pipeline that you see, and the water's coming from the

trucks into that holding pond. each one of the trucks is 5,000-gallon truck. so to get five million gallons of water, those trucks -- a thousand truckloads of water needs to be used to fill that pond. so i know where they're getting the water for this particular well. it's from a creek which is a two-and-a-half hour round trip from this well site. so you can see there's a lot of truck traffic on the road associated with this shale gas operation. susquehanna river basin commission head this graph to put in context -- made this graph to put in context the total amount of water that they think is going to be used for hydraulic fracturing purposes in pennsylvania, and that's what you see in the yellow box there. it's pointing to the usage by the gas industry that they've projected. 0 million gallons per day -- 30 million gallons per day. and they've compared this to

other water uses for water supply, energy production, recreation, etc. and just to give you a perspective that this is really not a huge amount of water for the susquehanna basin. that's a pretty water-rich basin, and it has other uses that are much greater than the shale gas will use. however, the total water use is really not the issue. the issue is where are you taking the water, and when are you taking it. so the location of the withdrawal is very important. here you see a withdrawal from a very small stream, and you can easily imagine that if they put too many straws drawing too much water, you could easily draw up that -- dry up that small stream. so susquehanna river basin commission has certain places where surface water withdrawals are allowed to be taken. they're permitted withdrawal points. there's over 13 -- 170 of them. as i mentioned, it's not just where you take the water, but the timing, the time of year that you take the water that's

important. here you see a graph, what's called a hydrograph showing stream flow in lycomeing creek during 2011. 2011 was the wettest year in history in pennsylvania. we had a very wet spring and a very wet fall, but in the summer during yul and august was -- during july and august the commission looked at the stream flow hydrograph and said, no, the industry cannot take any more water from 36 of these permitted withdrawal points. so i guess the answer to the question is there enough water is, yes, there's plenty of water, adequate water exists, but not everywhere, and not at all times. another question about the hydraulic fracturing that's in the news a lot is the chemicals that are mixed with the water and the sand, and the sand's used as the prop that you saw in that animation. what are those chemicals, what do they consist of.

recently, industry's disclosed a lot more of the chemicals that they're using. i got this information off of a publicly-available web page called frack focus, and that was put together by the groundwater protection council along with industry so so that as a portal, really, for disclosing the chemicals that are being used. i just picked a well at random in northern pennsylvania, and these were the actual percentages of chemicals used. there was only .3% of the total volume that was injected were added chemicals. now, .3%'s not a very big percentage, but when you put in 4.7 million gallons, turns out that's about 11,000 gallons of chemical. so, you know, significant chemical usage is happening here. if you look at the circle on the right, i've broken down the chemicals, and you can see that the acid fraction is,

contributes probably three-quarters of the amount of the added chemicals. the acids used to clean out the well that you saw in the animation where they perfect rate the casing -- perforate the casing and they follow that up with an acid treatment to clean out the holes they've made into the casing and rock. some of the other compounds you can find on fact focus are mainly compounds that are used to keep the holes open so that they don't get clogged up with bacterial activity or just with corrosion. ..

and this flow back water continues to come out although less and less volumes the salinity increases dramatically. after two weeks we're the flowback consists of hardly any of the original water probably that was put in, mostly the brian. brian: that exists in the formation brine you have to dispose of it properly the disposal is big issue. early in the shale gas play in bense vain.

i mean four or five years ago, the a lot of wastewater is sent to municipal treatment plants which were really not well-suited or designed to handle the flowback chemistry, the high dissolved solids load. that practice has largely been stopped in pennsylvania there are some industrial treatment plants that, can treat the water to various degrees but there is not a lot of those. i you are to the one of the treatment plants and the polished water which starts out as the 200,000 milligrams per liter water after it has been distilled comes out as about 100 milligrams per liter of finished product. that can be disposed of safely throughout the municipal treatment plant. a lot of water is sent to neighboring states for deep well injection. at least that's been the case previous few years.

the next speaker will talk more about deep well injection. a lot of the operators are telling me now that they are 100% recycling their frack water. they use the frack water in a job. what returns to the surface they containerize. they do treatment on it and use it on their next well. that is very encouraging development. this is a really nice animation from southwestern energy that shows what you like to see. you've drilled well into the target formation down at the water there. you've eyes lated that well with multiple strings of steelcasing and cement. and we're producing red gas bubbles in this case from the march sal less -- marcelas, floating up to the surface. there are two formations

above the marcelas that also contain gas shown by the little relcircles. that is very common occurrence in pennsylvania. not just the marcellus shale that has gas. there is lot of shale in the march zealous -- marcellus that natural contain a small amounts natural gas. in drilling for the marcellus shale the operators have to drill through the shallower gas-producing units. sometimes what they want to do is seal those off so those small amounts of gas can't escape and contaminate the environment. here's an example how that contamination could happen if the cement job on the well is not done properly. in this case in the circular insert you can see an illustration, a cartoon showing that the cement is not bonded properly to the rock that allows some of the gas to seep out of that shallow-producing zone, move

up the annulus of the well between the two casing strings that has not been cemented and then find its way out into the environment to maybe contaminate some freshwater. so, the industry tries hard to prevent this. this is what we call stray gas and it is one way that gas can get into the environment. that is not the only way but a lot of the cases of gas migration that you hear about and blamed on hydraulic fracturing are more likely caused by this kind of well construction problem. so all of these issues i talked about people are asking, what is the cumulative impact or cumulative effect of all those things put together, all those wells? well, i don't know but it is going to depend ultimately on the regulations. the regulations have changed twice in pennsylvania in the last couple years. so those i'm sure are going to be modified as time goes

on. also action by industry. the procedures and practices that industry has been taking have changed over the last five years tremendously. and also the monitoring and research. that is where usgs comes in. monitoring the quality of our surface and groundwaters is very important and of really fundamental importance is getting a snapshot of the baseline quality of these resources before drilling comes in. you can see in pennsylvania and some of these areas, well the horse is already out of the barn. it is tough to find, collect baseline conditions now. also research. research needs to be done in a lot of issues where we really don't know what is going on. one example is, when we do seek chemicals, contaminants in the environment we need to find way to fingerprint those contaminants so we can identify what the sources are. are they narrowly occurring?

are they coming from a leak in a gas well? thanks very much. >> thank you very much. dennis. our third speaker tonight is bill lee. bill the associate coordinator for the usgs earthquake hazards program here. bill is seismologist who oversees the earthquake monitoring and reporting capabilities of the usgs. bill serves as usgs acting director for hazards from 2010 to 2011 and in the past two years bill has been called upon many times for his expertise on the subject of triggered earthquakes including those associated with hydraulic fracking. in just the past months bill has given several briefing on induced earthquakes to senior administration and congressional level. bill joined the usgs in 1986 after receiving a doctoral

degree in sizemology and geology from columbia university. he served as chief of the usgs special geological studies group and senior technical advisor to the assistant secretary of state for compliance with nuclear test ban treaties. bill will conclude's tonight's lecture by discussing how disposal of waist fluid into injection in deep rock formations can generate earthquakes. >> thanks, david. so induced earthquakes i refer to this as triggered earthquakes. all basically the same phenomenon. and it's been quite a hot topic as you probably know just from reading the newspaper in the last few years. we've, in the last year we've had, either likely or potentially triggered earthquakes from the disposal activity that dennis talked about in arkansas and southern texas, southern colorado, oklahoma,

west virgina, and ohio. so it seems like sort of a new phenomenon certainly in the news lately but it is actually not. this slide is to give you a feel for what, what's been a fam none known for more than 50 years now. here's a list of either the largest or the most significant earthquakes in several different areas due to several different human activities around the world. starting with back in the '60s in rangely, colorado, injection experiments. rocky mountain arsenal. i want you to remember this one. this is the largest well-documented injectio injection-induced earthquake. 5.3. in uzbekistan, former soviet union. three earthquakes not necessarily due to injection. we don't know what happened there. certainly due to the human gas ex-tracks activities in gazli. water reservoirs trigger

earthquake as in lake meade in nevada and california and many other places around the world. geothermal, the geysers geothermal field where the injection of fluid to increase production of geothermal energy led to earth i can quake of 4.6. and it is not a new that mom that. we understands why this happens very well. it is actually very difficult to predict when this is going to happen and research problem working on what to do about it when it does happen. many of these, as you see are related to the injection activity and that's what i'm going to focus my remarks on tonight. those activities that humans are involved with and entail involve fluid injection at depth are the waste liquid disposal of all types, disposal into wells into the

earth. geothermal production as i pensioned and these three production activities, enhanced production activities doug described. tight shale, tight-sand, coal-bed methane can involve fracking and associated need to dispose the formation water, fluids that dennis described. also in the future sitting out there is carbon dioxide sequestration. there are some pilot projects now but should carbon dioxide geologic sequestration become a big activity in the united states in the future this will involve the injegs of large amounts of fluid into the, into the earth with the potential of triggering earthquakes. through the chesapeake video that you saw at the beginning and dennis's talk i think you understand this process well now. the formation where the gas is, it is fracked and that fracking process may use a

million or some millions of gallons of water in order to extract the gas. this is not the process that triggers the earthquakes in the cases that we know about. it does make very small earthquakes that actually can be diagnostic for the industry to learn how their fracking activities going. is it achieving what they want to achieve in terms of the perforation or the fracturing of the formation. but what occurs after the formation, after the rock is fractured and during the production stage, during that video you saw will the little red bubbles bubbling up to the surface. water is returned to the surface. this formation, this brine dennis described can be quite salty and has to be disposed of somehow. in some cases it can be recycled a as dennis described and in some cases it can be sent to a water treatment plant. however in many cases there

is such a large volume of fluid comes up from this brine it is not economic for that to be disposed of at a water treatment plant or to be recycled and it is disposed of through a disposal well. that process is illustrated in this cartoon. the fracking occurs. the formation fluid is returned to the surface of the it is sent off to a disposal well where it is injected deep. typically, typically to a depth that is actually has potential for storing enough energy to trigger an earthquake. most of the time that doesn't occur and that's what we're really keeping in mind even though we have some very noteworthy cases where it has occurred. this can be a very large amount of fluid and, fluid from several of the production wells may be tapped into the same disposal well. typically is tapped into the same disposal well. i willlous straight here what a wellhead looks like. but the other phenomena here that's of interest is the trucking of this which

dennis described for the fracking operation there is also trucking that can be associated with the disposal operation and the earthquake that was triggered and all ther quakes that have been triggered over the last year near young town, in young town, ohio, that fluid being disposed of there is actually formation water, produced water from the fracking activities in pennsylvania. there is no activity in youngs -- youngstown, ohio. why does this happen? i will try to lead you there you this in a simple way. first it is important to understand once you go a few kilometers deep in the earth the earth is everywhere stressed and of course the earth is pervasively fractured and faulted. from stress measurements made across the united states we actually know that these natural stresses put faults and fractures close to failure. there's, the difference in

the rate of earthquakes in the west and the rate of earthquakes in the east is not because there's no stress in the east. it's because there is a much higher rate of deformation in california and alaska, for example. so the natural stresses put the faults and fractures at close to failure. when you inject water, any fluid, into the rock at depth that forces the fluid along those fractures at high pressure and releases -- relieves what is called the effective stress on that fault. essentially the fluid pushes the side of the fault apart which is easy to imagine. but what it does it allows that fault to slip more easily than it would have had it not been pressurized. so the injection activity pushing large volumes at high pressure down deep into rock which is already stressed is what is allowing the earthquakes to be triggered the formation of new fractures, that is the

hydrofracture, actually doesn't release very much energy compared too much larger triggered earthquakes. the hydro frack, the earthquakes typically would be limited to two and there would be lots of them and they're not really a safety concern. it is really injection of the fluids that have to be dishe is toed of that are a consequence of the production operation that is, has the potential to trigger earthquakes. i think i just made my last point. so if is this a significant phenomenon in the united states? this graph i will try to walk through with you to convince you it in fact is a very significant phenomenon in the united states although it is localized and of course the earthquakes have not been all that large but what my colleague bill elsworth from the usgs and from the usgs office in

menlo park have done is a simple exercise to count the number of earthquakes. they're counting all the earthquakes in the central part of the united states between these two bars larger than magnitude 3 through 1970 through most of last year. this is, count does not representative of the size of the just the number of earthquakes of any size larger than magnitude 3. what you see here is a fairly constant rate of earthquakes from 1970 through about the year 2000. that's about, average of 21 earthquakes per year and a fairly steady rate. and we believe that the catalog is complete for this magnitude level all the way back to 1970. so this is representative of a pretty stable process of earthquake generation in the central united states. then what happens in about the year 2000, about the turn of the century, 2000, 2001, that rate increases

and that's shown by this green line here. it actually increases by about 50%. and we associate that, there's large proportion of those, what you might call excess earthquakes that are occurring in colorado and they're associated with the production of coal bed methane. then, in about 2008 that rate goes up again. it goes up quite significantly and in fact it is more than seven times larger than the long-term average. this, this rate is something that really can not be explained by any natural process. during this time period we don't have any large earthquakes in the central u.s. that would have a large series of aftershocks which would bump up the numbers. this is a pretty stable rate during this entire time of earthquakes but then it jumps up at this very much larger rate. so this is what we interpret to be a human-induced process and geographicly

spatially associated with these enhanced recovery activities two previous speakers talked about. i'll give you an example of one of them. this is the induced earthquakes near guy, arkansas. guy, arkansas is right here. and the injection wells in the area, this is a shale gas play, enhanced recovery, fracking operation and disposal as was described earlier. the triangles here that are numbered, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, through 8 are the disposal wells in this area. they are not shown are the production wells and these numbers, with the letter and number, those are seismographs deployed, seismographs deployed by the university of memphis, one of our partners. so these are recording earthquakes and earthquakes are shown here in yellow and red and show a progress of

time. the red earthquakes happening earlier and migrating to the south quite obviously what is a fault in the rock over a period of about a year and a half. so the fault is well-defined. this fault is obviously then the conduit for the injected fluids and it is that fault that's responsible for having produced this magnitude 4.7 earthquake. what makes this is a particularly useful case of triggered earthquake scientifically, after the 4.7 earthquake the arkansas oil and gas commission halted injection at two of the wells and very promptly the earthquake sequence died down. that is the kind of smoking gun that is very helpful to have when somebody says how do you know, how do you know those earthquakes were triggered? how do you know they're not natural earthquakes because there are natural earthquakes in arkansas? well that, the fact that that sequence decide as soon as those wells were, their disposal activities were,

were halted by the oil and gas commission, provides that evidence. they started a third well and injected fluid and the earthquake started up again. we have very well-established case. this is published in the current issue of seismological research letters. if you want to see the gory details. so the research questions are these just to put them simply. why do triggered earthquakes occur in some places and not in others? there are 150,000 disposal wells in the united states that are permitted. of those, about 40,000 of the wells are associated with disposal related to oil and gas activities and yet we have only a dozen or so cases that of significantly large triggered earthquakes. most of the wells that do this injection are not triggering earthquakes. another question is, then once the earthquake occurs,

what do you do? these three questions are the management questions. they have a scientific basis we're working on now to try to defined so we could get this stage down here, what do you do to regulate or permit the activity either before or after a significant earthquake occurs? what process change should be implemented? so i'm going to give you two end members of that sort of management challenge and one is a fairly optimistic one which is held by some people who believe that the process can be controlled and that we can minimize the risk of triggering an earthquake from a disposal activity. and that goes back to the very first line of my first slide, the experiment that was done in rangely, colorado. this was an injection-triggered earthquake experiment. it was designed to, determine whether or not an injection activity could induce an earthquake and whether changes to the injection activity could

ameliorate the earthquake hazard. so there was variations in size misty. the results of this experiment are said to have confirmed the predicted effect of fluid pressure on the earthquake activity and indicate the earthquakes may be controlled by manipulating the fluid pressure in the fault zone. i was asked this question, it was last year, when the earthquakes were occurring in west virgina, by, one of the state managers responsible for permitting the activity and not knowing what to do he had already decided that they were going to cut the volume in half, to cut the permit volume in half. the question is, is that adequate? in fact in west virginia earthquakes have continued in the same area. so the other end member of this is that it's really an

open question and that's illustrated by this graph which shows the maximum magnitude of a documented sequence of induced earthquakes from many places all around the world. this rma, rocky mountain arsenal, gey is the geysers in california. asa is ohio and so on. these are distinguished by the cases of fluid injection and other causes the largest earthquakes those that occurred in gazli, uzbekistan is the dot back up here the one we don't know very much about. you see that trend? that trend is maximum magnitude plotted against the log of the dimension effected by the fluid injection. essentially that is the area affected by the continued pumping of water into a single injection well or a set of injection wells. essentially this, this phenomenon, that dimension

in which the earthquakes are triggered by the injection activity is a function of the volume of fluid that goes in. and so what you see here is actually correlation between the volume of fluid and the maximum magnitude. this would indicate, contrary to the previous slide, that the more water or fluids that you put down the hole, the more waste that is disposed of the larger the potential earthquake. and that dilemma, that research quest, that is the research question which usgs is trying to address now working with epa on some case studies and we're also working on the theoretical side of the problem. which of these two end members is going to be defining of whether or not once an earthquake occurs of a significant size at a disposal site, one can alter the practice to minimize the risk? so finally, when, if you need more information on the subject, i'm pointing you to

our website. we have a frequently-asked question set for earthquakes that are induced by fluid injection and the answer, some of the questions that you may have. thank you. >> thank you [applause] maybe we can give a round of applause for all of our speakers. thank you. [applause] we're ready to take some questions now. if you want to line up at the microphone over there and while you do so, i might mention that our next public lecture is scheduled for wednesday, may, 2nd and it is titled, nature's altered seasons. we certainly encourage you to attend that if you wish. so if we can start with the questions and our speakers will do our best to vet

them. first question. >> [inaudible]. how much money developer put into a pad and how much money does he make pulling gas out of it? i want to invest. >> [inaudible]. >> because of cameras and so on. anybody answer that? >> another question? >> are you familiar with the use of propane as a fracking fluid and is it as good as it sounds? >> would you repeat the question, please? >> the question was about the use of propane as a fracking fluid. yeah, that's new to me and i

just heard about it in the media recently. so about the only thing i can say i know it would lessen the amount of water that's used on each one of the pads. what other chemicals it would involve i don't know. >> i guess i have a kind a strange meta question. i'm struck by the contrast between the number of people who are here, presumably they have other things they could be doing, and the rather scientific and quiet tone of the presentation. very technical talk. i'm wondering, i'm trying to understand why there is such a great interest on the part of the audience and yet the spirit of the presentation was rather technical and somewhat distant? there obviously is a great deal of concern on the part of people about this subject and yet, none of that was really conveyed by the

presentations that i heard. any of you have any recent vases about this whole process you'd like to admit to us today? >> again, i think, at the beginning of the talk i talked about how we don't take a position on these. we try to do the best science that we can to inform those who do make policy and form the -- inform the public, such as you, so you can be active in your community if you want to about these things and become informed. i was born and raised to be a scientist and this is what i do. and so it's not me taking an advocacy role for any position or another position. >> people are very interested in the topic and public, industry, federal and local officials and we try to remain dispassionate and address in objective manner as possible, to apply the science but not report on what the interpretation how the science might be applied later.

>> well, i'd like to follow up on that. first of all i enjoyed all of them but the last one especially. but in terms of being totally objective, when i see the only films that you're showing are from, besides usgs are from industry, that is not, what you might call fair and balanced. and i wish you would had shown a couple scenes from gas lapped, which showed the true effects of these procedures. you didn't even mention the fact that that there was a waiver to the clean water act, sometimes known as the cheney waiver, which said that these companies do not have to reveal what chemicals are going into the ground. and yet you have, and yet you have government agencies approving this. so my question is, well, one question is, do the companies have any responsibility in terms of the damages caused by earthquakes for example? are they held accountable financially or any other way? do you know?

>> as far as i know, no, there's no direct -- better way to say this i don't know of any laws which have been enacted which would put the companies at liability or -- earthquakes damage. >> thank you. with the exception of the last one i thought past industry in general. if i could real briefly? if i could real briefly address the, your comment about the films. i will have to take credit for, encouraging the use of the first film because i was putting the other presentation a couple months ago and wanted to try to illustrate the concept of hydraulic fracturing and i found that this film was very fair and straightforward and factual and did a much, much better job than i could do.

and then with respect to "gasland" i was in it. if that helps you at all. >> like to also make a one other comment about the regulatory aspect. the disposal of the produced water from fracking operation actually is regulated by epa. epa has a program called, underground injection control. and if you really want to dig into it, the well type, which is commonly associated with the disposal activity is underground injection control type 2 well. i might add in dennis's presentation he talked about stray gas that might eminate along the well annulus, we're certainly well wear of the fact that the public in general is possible occurrence of gas could get up into water well or public water supply and so-called,

stray gas, potentially has a number of different sources only one of which might be hydrofracture generated efforts. one of our goals in our program as we continue to develop it here at the usg to better understand the various sources of stray gas. are they not only coming from the shell gas used dennis described in his portrayal but coal bed and coal bed methane sources or even from the decay of biogenic gas from vegetative matter. understanding the natural sources of gas, the rate which they occur is part of our overall plan. >> i don't really have a question but i want to congratulate you recognizes the rangely field experiments and the denver well experiments that jack hayley and, hubbard worked on back in the, late '60s and there is a, they did publish their results in a

science magazine article which seems to have been lost to an awful lot of investigators. but i think it is very relevant to what people should be looking at now. thank you. >> thank you very much it is very relevant and that old paper has been certainly uncovered by quite a lot of people in the last years. >> rawley and jack healy were some of our pioneers in the usgs earthquake program looking whether try to predict earthquakes. that was part of the experimentation. >> a lot of people don't seem to have found it yet. i'm glad you did. >> i'm just, i'm just curious on the approximate distance from the borehole that the fracks or the perfs extend? so the borehole is horizontal. the fracks are going up and down, ballpark what is that distance?

>> the data that i've seen, again would be from industry that in pennsylvania there is some barriers to the propagation of the frack. so the load line itself is beyond the limestone. and it's a pretty significant barrier to propagation of the fractures below. limestone in the marcellus which seems to be much less effective and, limiting the propagation of fractures vertically. so the some of the data i've seen hundreds to 1,000 feet vertically is what i've seen. 1,000 feet being sort of the maximum. so if you're tapping the marcellus shale at depths between 5 and 8,000 feet in pennsylvania.

so you still got considerable amount of shale and sandstone between the freshwater which is maybe a 1,000 feet of maximum and the, the fracking below the well. but in some other places in new york or ohio, some of these units may be tapped at >> -- that indicated that the emissions from a large field that included a lot of fracking and other oil and gas operations was several

times what the, right. thank you. what was, the emissions were several times as much as, conventional inventories would indicate should come and that a substantial amount of that, some of it was coming from the storage of natural gas liquids associated with these wells but substantial amount must have been coming from the well itself based upon the composition. and that's, that raised the question of more specifically of what part of the operations are actually responsible for those leaks? which are very important to the greenhouse gas emission issue. i wonder if you could comment on that? >> sure. i'll take that. we are aware of that report that came out from noaa and i'm not aware of anyone in the usgs working on that problem right now.

>> maybe i could ask one other question then? about up in pennsylvania there was a recent interesting film shown on maryland public tv that talked a lot about pennsylvania and it indicated people had not been too unhappy over the years when natural gas pro conventional wells in their backyards but now are, many of many who at least are very unhappy what is happening with fracking. and part of that is just industrial activity that you pointed out on your presentations about having large pads and lots of trucks going by, et cetera. i wonder if you could put that in perspective? because if there are many more wells necessary for natural, for conventional gas than there would be for fracking, then, is it simply

a question of a lot more potential fracking that is going to go on? because they're talking about the possibility of 100,000 wells or they suggested that there might be eventually 100,000 fracking wells in pennsylvania and that has got people quite upset. can you put that in perspective the impacts historically of conventional natural gas wells and why fracking may be so much more of a concern to people in terms of just land disturbance and industrial activity? >> [inaudible]. >> i think it probably, as you say, has a lot to do with the disturbance. truck traffic and that kind of thing. when i was up in the area in york, pennsylvania, those are the things i hear most about is just the amount of congestion and hustle, bustle and truck traffic,

that kind of thing. i really can't answer in much more detail. i don't know how to compare conventional gas versus hide de -- hydrofracked gas and say much more than i said in my talk about the advantages and disadvantages of the pad sizes and what not. >> i will add to that, our researchers are using remote sensing techniques to look at the total amount of disturbance associated with construction of pads, pipelines and roads for wells that are fracked compared to wells that are conventional, conventional, shallower production and i think that is due to be out in the next several months. so i would say to check back and there will be some results on exactly to the question that you asked. >> and dennis mentioned earlier in his remarks,

where hardly any hydrocarbon production in the past, sudden activity brand new to a community is a stark change to what they're accustomed to, not just more truck traffic but whole effect on that community of that many people. companies come in and lease up every room in the hotel. it really changes the dynamics of the area. one of our aspects of our study will look at socioeconomics or the effects of changing the way which communities react to this big increase in industrial activity. >> okay. my question has to do with the protection of the shallow aquifers. seems like the well casing and the annular seal is one potential weak link in protecting the shallow aquifers. are there any regulatory requirements for doing well integrity tests prior to conducting the fracking operations? >> yeah, there are regulations that have been modified by a year ago in

pennsylvania that increased the requirements for, you know, the strength of the cement. how long the cement needs to set before you can do any drilling and, i don't know the specifics of all that but, but, yeah, there are definitely a lot of regulations about the cement and the casing. >> thank you. >> hello. just a quick question. i was wondering what type of focal mechanism orientation, variability do you tend to find in the induces seismicity in the injected water? and is there variability from region to region? >> i'm sorry, can you hear me? >> yeah, i can hear you. >> okay. i'm not able to hear you very well. could you say that again. >> basically i'm curious, about the variability of the focal mechanism orientations

of the induced seismicity. if there's -- >> so -- there it is. that's why you can't hear me. okay. it's not working? >> can't hear you. >> a good example is that, --. >> [inaudible]. >> yeah, i can't, your question, if i heard it right was about the variability of the focal mechanism? >> orientation of the fracture orientation induced -- >> right. so the most, in most, first of all the focal mechanism is the orientation of the fault in the direction of motion on the fault essentially and the question is about the consistency of that. so in most cases we do not have good enough seismic networks around the induced earthquake activity to be very sure of the orientation

of the focal mechanism and its variability around a single injection site. >> right. >> but a very good example we do have that information is in arkansas. and i did point this out in the slides that i showed, when you looked at this later online you can go back to this. that fault plain that was, that is, on which all those earthquakes are occurring is, is both very well-defined bit earthquakes and the focal mechanisms or the sense of motion of all of those earthquakes is very, very consistent. it is a single process. a whole lot of earthquakes triggered with the same type of motion. it indicates the stress field is uniform and that indicates that the injection process has modified the stress within a larger

field. >> thank you. >> we're going to halt the formal questions at this point because we're well over the allotted time but we would be more than happy for the few people that still have questions come on up and ask us directly what those, we would like to know about. we'll do the best we can responding. thank you very much for coming. [applause] >> it t this afternoon here on c-span two, some sessions on event for congressional redistricting. the u.s. constitution requires the federal government conduct a census every 10 years for the purpose of assigning representatives to each state. stanford law school held a symposium assess impact current state measures will have on voting rights in various communities. that is one 30 eastern here on c-span2. all this week on c-span2 we're bringing you selected q&a interviews with

producers, directors and subjecting documentary films. today, filmmaker carl colby discuss as documentary film about the live of his father. cia director william colby. he talks about the choice of his mother, barbara colby as one of his primary interviews sources. q&a all this week 7:00 p.m. eastern on c-span2. all this week in prime time on c-span2 we're featuring some of "book tv" weekend programs.

>> this year's studentcam competition we asked students to submit a video telling us what part of the constitution was most important to them and why. today we're hear in washington, d.c. to speak with simon yo, a 8th grader from the lab school of washington. good morning simon. >> good morning. >> your video was about due process in the digital age. can you explain to us what due process is? >> sure. due process is in simple terms the government treating you fairly and giving you the rights you deserve in court and in legal circumstances. >> what effect has the digital age had on due process? >> digital age has had a huge effect on due process because today there is so much technology. we're carrying around phones that give off our location. 25 years ago that didn't exist. and so today we really have to figure out what can the government track, know about

you through your information and what can't they. >> in your documentary you referenced the ecpa. can you let us know what does that stand for and how does it relate to today's technology? >> the ecpa, stands for the electronic communications privacy act. that was passed 20 six years ago. now 26 years ago we didn't have nearly as advanced technology as we do today. people couldn't imagine they would be storing everything and have so much information about us online. you know, and so, now it's really a question of what should the government be able to access online? is online like a park where they, public park where they can know anything that you leave there or more like your home where they do need a warrant to come in and search for you? >> you interviewed two he can others on this topic. how did they understand the different sides? >> i don't think any amount of research as much as they helped us understand the topics and different sides of that. we talked to stuart baker,

steven johnson, who is really representing the government side of the argument. your location is obvious we should be able to know about you and everywhere online. >> how did your research affect your own opinion? >> before we did this i really dent know that much about the government could know about me online and facebook. of a doing this i have a greater understanding of what they do know and that everything i post there isn't just for me. it's for the government if they want and anybody who can take time to see. >> it what did you learn from this experience? >> i learned pretty much a ton of stuff. i learned all about due process. general and due process in the digital age and i also worked on a team to make this documentary come to life. >> and what do you want others to take away after watching your video? >> i want others to realize we use technology all the time. we use it at school, work, at home and on the go we and

others to realize it is not only the information they post online isn't only for them. the government can access it. we really need to think about what we put online and make sure it is secure. >> thanks so much for joining us, simon and congratulations on your win. >> thank you. >> here's a portion of simon's video, "due process in the digital age woet. quote. >> give e-mails to google or hotmail, if hotmail or google decides to give the information to the police there is nothing you can do about it. now people are really saying, gee, so much of my private life is in the hands of google i should be able to insist the government get a warrant before seizing. >> recently the justice department argued in court that cell phone users have given up privacy of their location and information when they voluntarily give up that information to their carriers. just this past april, it also argued in court that it should have to have access

to some e-mails and secure information without a search warrant. in 1986 the police would usually have to deploy actual police resources in rd to track someone. but with today's technology the government can monitor anyone with a gps enabled device or any cell phone connected to a wireless network. >> you can watch this video in its entirety and as well as all the other winning entries on our web sooint. studentcam.org. and continue the conversation on our twitter and facebook pages. last week leaders from egypt and tunisia spoke at an event hosted by the carnegie institute for international peace in washington, d.c. looking at emerging islamic political parties in the middle east and north africa. this panel discussion runs an hour and 40 minutes.

>> oak. good afternoon to all of you. a few colleagues are coming in through the door but in the interests of those have already arrived we should get started. we're going to now move from the politics to the economics and, we have wonderful panel which is going to lay out a little bit in terms of vision and economic strategy that is there for both tunisia and jordan, egypt, and then, i would very much like this to be an interactive panel. so in a way the more we have questions from the floor, the more specific can be the responses and the more we'll be able to get to the heart of issues that are on the minds of the audience. you have the bios of all of our distinguished panelists. so i'm not going to go over the details except to tell you who is sitting where.

sitting here he is of course from tunisia. nile is the fellow sitting next to me. he is from jordan. and then of course hussein is from egypt. what i would like each of the panelists to do is take 10 minutes, to answer the question, which i think is on many people's mind about the economics, which is the following. a year after the start of the arab spring in all of the three countries that are sitting here, the good news is there hasn't been an economic crisis. so, all three have managed to avoid a crisis. but that is really all one can say. if you look at the economics a year later, there's been no growth in any of these

economies. a little bit of negative growth really in a couple. unemployment has gone up. social pressures are rising and even maintaining macroeconomic stability has become more challenging because the pressures on these economies have increased. so one immediate challenge facing all these countries and indeed the governments that will be taking office or have already taken office, how do you avoid a crisis in the next year? that's the immediate challenge. but what brought about the revolution and uprising wasn't because there was macroeconomic instability in these countries. none of these countries had macro instability before. what brought about the revolutions bass the sense that the growth that was happening whether it was high enough, whether jobs were being created. young people were coming on the market without any opportunities for them and what opportunities were

there were not being distributed fairly. so there is really a big project of economic transformation and five years from now what the economic outcomes on which governments in all of the middle east will be judged is partly on whether they avoided a crisis because a crisis like heart attack, you have a crisis, everything stops, you focus on that so you want to avoid that but just avoiding a crisis isn't going to be enough and what people will judge governments on is how did you generate the jobs that were needed, the transformation that was required to make growth more inclusive. to have safety nets that were targeted, to have people feeling that they have an opportunity to participate? so my question to all three of you will be, if you could take 10 minutes, to lay out where you think you would like to be in five years, and what is it that you think you're going to do that will help to get you

there and what help do you need from the rest of the world to help you get there? so then i think we can get into specifics of that but if you could start with that i might start with you, mondher, if i could. >> sure. thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to lay down the economic policy of tunisia as we go forward. i would just like to take you back on the reasons for the revolution. there are two main slogans that were raised during the tunisian revolution which is liberty and dignity. so it is not the bread and food revolution. it's the revolution against dictatorship to regain freedom and dignity as well. which we need to keep that in mind. but there were also some socioeconomic problems that were, you know, developing in the society before the

revolution. now the strategy fortune tune has been published just two days ago and i encourage all of you to go seek it on the web because the government presented its strategy on the, to the national constitutional assembly on monday as well as the complimentary budget for 2012 and there is a lot that can be learned from an official government document which is 120 pages with many details. basically let me brief but the general outlook and the general picture in the government strategy. when we sat down to put the strategy for this government that the coalition government, we were afraid by, if we had an elaborate strategy, and a general policy and a general framework and a very developed policy, published,

that it will give the wrong signals to the people. and we would be criticized as, you know, being just for a period of one year and giving a general policy where, you know, the execution of this policy might require five years or 10 years. on the other hand if we didn't do that, then we will just issue a set of measures with no general framework for those measures and which would not give visibility to the people, so what we finally did, is, state a vision fortune tune. we start from a vision. and the vision is to make, tunisia democratic, modern, and prosperous. democratic is the political reform process which we talked about this morning. modern is the type of society you would like to make which is a open society, a modern society where there will be reconciliation between islam and and

democracy with modernty. economic prosperity is the economic program of the government and where we want tunisia to be in the next five years. now, now this, vision was detailed and general policies were stated where how we're going to execute this. on the economic and social front, the economy basically starts from the precept that in tunisia growth, employment comes from growth. we have no oil. we have no gas. we have no minerals. the only way we can provide jobs if we create growth. and one percentage point of growth is equivalent to 15,000 jobs. so in order to observe all new cameras on the job market which is approximately 100,000 new job-seekers every year we